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Jimmy Wyble

By Ernesto | February 5, 2008

With all my fascination for counterpoint on the guitar, I feel bad for not having mentioned Jimmy Wyble yet.  The truth is I’ve yet to check out his book The Art of Two-Line Improvisation, which doesn’t seem to be available in Amazon or Sheetmusicplus at the moment. Mel Bay doesn’t say it’s out of print, though. *sigh*, I guess counterpoint just isn’t hip enough for the kids today.

From what I understand, this book is a series of etudes for playing two-part counterpoint in a jazz setting.  The good news is that David Oakes has posted two of Jimmy’s etudes on his site.

Now, these are from an older book called Classical Country which I had understood to be the same book with a different title, but I could very well be wrong.

I sight-read through the first etude and it’s pretty interesting; definitely worth checking out.  If anything, they’re good for developing polyphonic chops and playing that type of material over jazz harmony. Now if I could only get my hands on that book…

Topics: Counterpoint, Guitar, Jazz |





4 Responses to “Jimmy Wyble”

  1. Fox Says:
    February 5th, 2008 at 2:10 pm

    Those etudes look pretty interesting. I think I’ll have to try them out. Another resource for bringing the ideas of counterpoint into the modern age is the article “Seven Steps to Heaven: A Species Approach to Twentieth-Century Analysis and Composition”, by Henry Martin in Perspectives of New Music (Vol.38, No.1, Winter, 2000). It is available through JSTOR if you have access to that. He uses the ideas of species counterpoint to look at the music of Copland, Bartok, Shostakovich, etc. Their music isn’t jazz, but a lot of the harmonic implications are similar.

  2. Ernesto Says:
    February 7th, 2008 at 12:40 am

    Cool, everytime I google for this kind of stuff I run into JSTOR articles, but I don’t have access to them. I’ll have to check out the local libraries, see if I can get them through there…

  3. james seaberry Says:
    June 2nd, 2008 at 6:57 pm

    I have corresponded with David Oakes for a while, and he says that “The Art Of Two-Line Improvisation” is in fact available directly from Mel Bay at the regular posted price. Do not buy it on E-Bay at inflated prices; it is NOT out of print.

  4. Ernesto Says:
    June 2nd, 2008 at 9:12 pm

    Cool, thanks for the tip!

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