The jazz theory book

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1. seanhunterSep 2026
   This is (mostly) not music theory and what is music theory is mostly wrong or incomplete to the point of being wildly misleading. Source: have degree and postgrad in music, was a professional musician until RSI put paid to that career, wife is a professional musician and teaches to postgrad level at 2 conservertoires, most of our friends are professional musicians, have a house full of scores and music books.

   If you actually want to learn music theory for the purposes of playing I strongly recommend you just follow whatever tutorials for your instrument and style and if you get to the point where feel you want to learn more and take it seriously in and of itself, buy “The Jazz Theory Book” by Mark Levine[1]. In spite of what it says, there really isn’t any such thing as Jazz theory - it’s just music theory, and this book is a great presentation with lots of good examples. If you like jazz (or the western popular music tradition including rock, pop, funk, etc) you’ll come out understanding how that music works better than most people. If you’re doing a music degree, there will be books recommended by your music programme, but honestly, Levine will cover most of what you need if you’re not doing a straight classical course in which case you’ll want to augment with a more conventional source so you understand the “rules” they want you to follow when writing pastiche counterpoint etc.

   If you want to get big into composition and/or want to understand late romantic and 20th century music, get Harmonielehre and “Structural Functions of Harmony” by Schoenberg. Together they are by far the best harmony books I have ever seen and go super-deep into why the western classical tradition works the way it does. If you compose there’s a decent chance they will change your life forever as his approach is to not take anything for granted but exhibit everything with examples from masterworks of the western tradition. Amazing books both of them. Harmony is not a spectator sport though - to get full benefit you have to get the books and work through stuff on the piano. It will reward you immensely.

   If you want something else that will blow your mind, read “The technique of my musical language” by Messiaen. If you read Levine first this will have the additional benefit of showing you where the “diminished” and “augmented” scales and the whole “harmonic major” thing come from.

   [1] https://www.shermusic.com/products/the-jazz-theory-book

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2. teifererSep 2026
   Props for mentioning “The Jazz Theory Book”! It's an excellent book.

   The only thing I'd add to your recommendations is: Listen! When you hear a song, some melody, a rhythm, listen carefully, try to deconstruct the components, how they interplay, and try to figure out what is it that you like. Was it a feature of the harmony? The melody? Pacing? Whatever it is, keep listening. Theory is just a way to try to explain what we hear and why we might like it. The more you listen, the more you have that you can base the theory on.

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3. williamcottonApr 2023
   In my early years as a musician I focused too much on theory.

   I didn’t really start to grow until I started to learn as many covers as I could and how to improvise a solo over the changes.

   The theory part helps only in that I know how a dim7 chord looks, sounds and feels but most importantly how it is used by composers.

   That being said, Mark Levine’s Jazz Theory book is excellent. And get a copy of a Real Book and watch YouTube videos on the voicings used by players and you’ll expand your harmonic palette immensely!

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4. seanhunterMar 2023
   The first thing I would say is that music theory is a very broad topic. You're going to have much better results if you study aspects of theory that you then practically apply in your musical life. So if you tend to play a certain style of music, learn the theory that applies to that first.

   Eg say you play rock/blues piano (or generally play pop music). You might want to start with learning pentatonic and blues scales, first in the keys of the pieces you play a lot, then in all keys.

   Say you like a certain player, you may want to look at a song they wrote/played, try to figure it out, try to understand how it works. So you could for example take apart the chord progression. Try to understand it harmonically, say there's a bit of the song that you like. Try to find other songs with a similiar progression. Then look at the voicings they use. Try to put those voicings into practise in your playing. Look at places you can use similar voicings for different chords.

   Since you go to a class make yourself an exercise between classes to find in your normal music examples of the things you did in class.

   There are very specific times when things like flashcards are going to be useful. For example, I made myself a deck of flashcards with different one-crotchet rhythmic snippets on them and used to deal myself out random bars of rhythms and then tap them out to improve my rhythm recognition for sight reading.

   For theory in the mainstream/classical tradition, I would highly recommend getting the ABRSM guide to music theory by Eric Taylor. It comes in two books, and you can get "workbooks" of examples to just go through. It's a pretty solid intro to the basics and by the time you have done both books you are at the standard of "grade 8" in music theory.

   From there, the traditional way to progress is to work on analyzing Bach Chorales (ie get that book which is just all the chorales) and then analyzing other major works from subsequent periods. Studying the chorales is a really excellent intro to most of the harmony that you will encounter until you get to the romantic period, and what I personally did is just work on Jazz harmony after that given that covers Romantic style harmony as well as the things that later 20/21C music does (eg if you can understand Miles you can understand Hindemith pretty much). For Jazz there are two books I would recommend, which are the Jazz Piano book and the Jazz Theory book both by Mark Levine.

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5. gspencleyMar 2023
   It sounds like when you say "theory" what you mean is sight-reading. I'm not aware of any tools but there must be lots of options online. I learned from books and it's just a matter of practice.

   There are lot of music theory books that I can recommend, but it sounds like your class has you covered. Sight reading is like learning to read a spoken language. You just need to do it every single day and it will come with time.

   If anyone else is interested in books that I would recommend for theory:

   - Elementary Rudiments of Music by Barbara Wharram (a good intro book)

   - The Jazz Theory Book by Mark Levine (this is my "theory bible" and, despite the title, is not limited at all to only jazz music)

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6. fuzzmuzzySep 2022
   The Jazz Theory book - Mark Levine

   High Performance Browser Networking - edit: Ilya Grigorik

   Effortless Mastery - Kenny werner

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