So You Want To Learn To Improvise? - Andrew Higgins

Tracing the steps taken by the author on his musical journey, So You Want To Learn To Improvise? Offers teachers and students a step-by-step guide to acquiring the skills needed to improvise at the piano. The book is deliberately stylistically non-specific, working from the premise that once the basics are secured, choices about style can be personal issues.

The content from So You Want To Learn To Improvise? is drawn from the material assembled over 25 years teaching experience in the classroom and at the piano, and 15 years of workshops, seminars and lectures across the world. The accumulation of teachers requesting that the ideas heard in the workshops be set in a usable step-by-step format with extensive musical examples to practise and teach from, made writing the book almost compulsory. The ideas are clear and specific, but demand a creative approach from the start, inculcating a mind-set that is both inquisitive and musical from the outset. The practise schedule is extensixe and progressive, demanding the student fully understand each process before moving on. The objective is to free the student from the 'tyranny' of notation, setting them free to explore music on their own terms.

Most lapsed pianists who return to the piano in later life cite' just playing whatever I feel like' as being the one quality they aspire to - So You Want To Learn To Improvise? offers them that oppourtunity, and more.