Jazz Reading Music

[Eddie Boyum]

Asa non-professional, intermediate-level guitarist interested in playing jazz, I wonder how important it is for me to be able to sight read music (and I mean standard music notation, not guitar tablature, etc.) in order to "take it to the next level".

While I can certainly think of many situations where reading may be required/helpful (e.g. some gigs, recording sessions, etc.), I also suspect that there are many highly skilled guitarists that do not know how to read.

I assume that it certainly "wouldn't hurt" to have this skill, but I'm not convinced that it's worth the significant investment. My current thinking is that it is more important to spend that time practicing in other ways, e.g. learning many scales, chord voicings, existing songs, working on rhythm, etc. However, I'm worried that I may be making a mistake.

I should have been clear that I'm more interested in informally playing in 3-4-5tets, but regardless, all the answers are really helpful. I think that what I'm going to do is try to invest a small amount of time to be able to read well enough to figure out new melodies/songs when I'm on my own, but I probably won't be investing the significant amount of time necessary to read and play unfamiliar music "in real time".

Personally, I play in 3-4-5tets and we don't really use music, we just call out tunes that everyone knows. I've had the pleasure to play in Paris as well, and there it is the same way; you don't see those guys looking at a paper while they play. In that case, the most important knowledge is knowing your way around chord progressions. While knowing the melody is also important, you don't have to play it note-for-note, rhythm-for-rhythm as it is on the page. That's frowned upon actually... you have to be able to improvise around a melody as well as chords.

So yes, while sight-reading is generally important for some setups, it's definitely far from the most important thing if you're a non-professional just looking to get some small group gigs and sit in places. Hope this helps!

Do you want to be able to play with other jazz musicians? Especially piano and horn players? They will NEVER have tab for you. NEVER. If you say "hey, do you have tab for that tune" they will either laugh at you or tell you to leave. They have standard notation that you will have to read off if you want to play a tune with them you don't know. If you are expected to play the melody of the tune, you will have to learn how to read, and probably transpose as well.

Do you want to be able to learn from the 400 years of music written down already using notation? Maybe learn some trumpet solos, or study a Coltrane lick or Debussy or Bach? If so, then you should learn to read chord charts at the very least for playing jazz. If you would rather not take advantage of all that learning that has already been saved, organized, and documented for you, then don't bother.

Those are the only two ways that you will be presented with new music in a live playing situation by proficient jazz musicians. No one is going to say "Hold on audience, while we teach this song to the guitar player". They are going to give you a chart, or just start playing and expect that you know the tune or can jump in and get it. This included auditions.

The trick is doing it. Every day. Look at some printed music. It is a water-wears-down-the-stone thing, you can only get six months good at reading music by reading music everyday for six months. You will get better at it the more you do it. Just get a fake book, crack it open and have at it. It will be slow and frustrating at first, but it will get better. The more you do it the faster it will improve. There is no trick or secret, just gotta do it.

But on the other hand be able to sight read is much less demanding. And You will have much deeper understanding of music You're playing/hearing. Areas which are much easier with sight reading than with tabs (or putting notation into a software like Guitar Pro) are: rhytmic playing, harmony, fretboard knowledge/phrasing and probably much more.

So if You are serious about it (and it's hard no to be serious with jazz) invest time to teach Yourself sight-reading. The progress will be slow, but it will gradually improve. Be patient and You will see what i'm talking about.

Lead sheets are the de facto standard resource for learning jazz songs. They have chords notated but the melodies are written in treble clef. The ability to sight read a single melody line is useful to the extent that you will be learning jazz songs from lead sheets. If you would like to be able to learn new songs on the spot, your sight reading will have to be good enough to allow it.

I'm a horn player (sax) that stumbled on this page by accident and I find that this issue even exist to be amusing. From a horn players perspective, the one thing that ticks me off about guitar players is they refuse to read. I'm not talking about chord charts or tab but standard musical notation. I have a jazz band that will set up between 3 to 15 musicians depending on what the gig calls for. We work from a "book" of loose leaf sheet music that has over 600 tunes and any one of them can be called on the gig. I expect the guitar player to see the music and play it note for note. If there is a melody line, the guitar player will need to play it not just strum chords.

I cant begin to count the number of guitar players that have asked me to see the music before the gig so they can "practice", or they want to know what keys we do the songs in. I inform them they get the music at the gig or rehearsal and if they want to take the music home to practice I appologize and say no. (I've lost to much music over the years to risk this anylonger). There are only about 3 guitar players in my area I honestly trust and I know can do the job, even though they may not be the best "soloist" but they are the most consistent and can play the charts.

To play jazz, you need to understand chords (harmony), which major and minor keys these are derived from, and how to voice these chords on your instrument. You need to understand the theory. This is the only thing you need at gigs. People generally don't take sheet music to gigs, they take lead sheets which just give you the chords and melody (so if you don't read music you need to be able to pick out a melody by ear. Not a hard thing to do if you are already doing the other.)

But here's the thing: to get to the point where you're understanding the harmony, you may need to be able to read music, because if you want to learn those things from books, that's the only way. Your other option is private mentoring (or online video lesson) where someone shows you what to do: hence there is no need for sheet music in this case.

What you really want to evaluate is whether learning to read music or any other skill, is going to be useful for you. It is not really about Wes or Joe Pass. It is about what you need to learn and what helps you the most.

I started with classical guitar, so everything was reading music for the first 4 or 5 years, but there was one aspect of it that I was not taught that is incredibly useful. At the same time, I was reading all the music I was playing so it was never something that it felt like I had to work on that much since that was just how you played guitar.

I think it is much more useful to look at the page and then be able to hear what that sounds like, because if you know what it sounds like then you can also find a way to play it. This might sound even more difficult, but for a lot of music that is not as difficult as you might think. Reading music then becomes a part of ear training, and approaching it like that is probably one of the best ways to learn that will also help you with a lot of other things in your playing.

Obviously, this will be something you partly already have and something you want to train and develop, but if you can read in a key like this, then if you have to play something almost only becomes a matter of knowing the scale of the key and then using that to play what is on the page.

And that is a very efficient way to learn music or internalize music, and the way music notation is made then it is a much bigger help than you think when it comes to this. This is really overlooked, and one of the worst examples of this is the Omnibook where everything is written out in C with accidentals, probably one of the things that annoys me the most in any Jazz education book.

You also need to be able to translate a written rhythm to something you can hear, so that a rhythm becomes something you can look at and then know the sound of. I am not going to get into that right now.

But hopefully, you can see how knowing the scale and being able to hear the notes in the scale will help you. There is another equally important thing to learn that is a little style-dependent, but which also makes things a lot easier.

Just like anything else you have to play then you need to practice to play it. If you need to learn 40 pop pieces for a gig or if you need to learn the originals in a band, then you practice those songs. Sometimes you get the material as an audio recording and sometimes it is written out.

The goal is the same: You need to end up playing it convincingly on the gig, and if that means practicing what is on a page to get it to the point where you can easily play it and get it to sound right. In my experience, it is better to be good at preparing and really nailing your part compared to being good at sight-reading it mostly just because practicing towards really playing it to the best of your ability is just a better strategy than trying to be really good at surviving your way through it.

And it is a different process if you are working on reading music and trying to turn that into a solid performance with good phrasing and timing, instead of trying to become good at just superficially playing through songs you have never seen before. Approaching it like that is the same as trying to learn to solo by improvising with iReal and letting the app choose random songs without actually learning them, that is just way too superficial.

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