How to Comp
by Hal Crook
★★★★⯨4.5The most systematic study of jazz comping ever written — dry as a textbook, but it trains the half of your playing that no other book even addresses.
Harmony & Voicings
Chord voicings, reharmonization, and harmonic concepts.
The Jazz Piano Book
by Mark Levine
★★★★⯨4.5The book I've learned the most from — I first got it around age fourteen and never really put it down. No single volume teaches the sound of modern jazz piano more directly.
The Jazz Theory Book
by Mark Levine
★★★★⯨4.5Still the default jazz theory text thirty years on — encyclopedic, musical, and built from real recordings, as long as you treat chord-scale theory as a map, not the territory.
The Serious Jazz Book IIBarry Finnerty
The Serious Jazz Book II
by Barry Finnerty
★★★★★4.0Book I stocked the pantry; this one teaches you to cook on real changes — chord-tone control from the blues to Coltrane, if you can take 190 pages of eighth-note lines.