Featured Book: Keyboard Latin Grooves for the Creative Musician (Book and CD)

Author: Rogelio Maya

Publisher: Mel Bay Publications

Year Published: 2001

Type: Musical Instruction

Format / Pages: / 59 pages

Review:

Keyboard Latin Grooves for the Creative Musician is a creative work indeed.  Rogelio Maya has designed his method in an engaging, educational, and enjoyable manner.  The complimentary audio CD further rounds out the student's experience.

There are over ninety-nine Latin style rhythms in this well-organized book.  After learning these fundamental rhythmic approches to Latin music, the pianist can easily adapt them to his/her personal style.  As you'd expect, some broad categories include numerous variations to consider and utilize.

Among the many grooves covered are Salsa, montunos, samba, mambo, merengue, bossa, con sabor, and jazz montuno.  Each selection is a work to study, then practice and perform. The merengue on page 43 and page 44 is a fine example of Rogelio Maya's fantastic teaching style.  The montuno is a specific groove complete with chord progressions, just one of many musical ideas expressed in this book.  The author does a good job of explaining these difficult patterns visually and audibly.  Appropriately, the text is provided in English and Spanish.

Rogelio Maya deserves a big round of applause for his book.  Everything the Latin-styled pianist needs is here, and can be immediately applied to jazz improvisation. 

Well-written and entertaining, recommended.

Additional Information: Check it out @ Amazon.com

ISBN: 1928827314

Reviewed by: Lee Prosser

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