The Serious Jazz Book II

The bottom line

Barry Finnerty’s working title for this book was “Harmonic Possibilities of the Improvised Line,” and it still appears in parentheses on the title page. That’s the whole project in five words. The Serious Jazz Practice Book gave you melodic raw material and ordered you to transpose it through twelve keys; Book II asks the follow-up question his introduction poses directly: can the soloist “really get inside the harmony of a tune and achieve real harmonic and melodic control of every note he is playing?” His answer, in the very next line: “Well, yes. It can be done. And this book is being written to light the way.”

The stance behind it is refreshingly unfashionable. Playing over changes, Finnerty writes, “is first of all an exercise in correctness. The craft of it comes first; the art comes later” — and he proposes a jazz version of the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm.” He backs it with Coltrane’s line, “The more you know, the more you can create.” If that framing annoys you, this book will annoy you for 190 pages. If it rings true — and after enough nights on the bandstand, it did for me — this is one of the most useful improvisation books Sher has published.

Same rating as Book I, different reasons: more immediately musical, more applicable, same blind spots.

Who it’s for — and who should skip it

Get it if you own Book I and kept wondering when the chord changes would show up — this is that missing half, and the two are designed as a pair. Get it if your lines sound fine over one chord but smear into vagueness the moment the harmony starts moving every two beats. It’s written for all instruments (single-line, treble clef), and Finnerty’s stated prerequisite is modest: “at least a basic knowledge of scales, modes, and chord formation.”

Skip it if you’re a beginner — pianists should start with Jazz Piano Fundamentals and come back later. Skip it if you want voicings or comping: there isn’t a single chord voicing in the book; pianists should keep The Jazz Piano Book next to it for the left hand. And skip it if you’re shopping for licks. Finnerty is openly contemptuous of “plenty of jazz books that write out some little II-V-I lick over and over again in each key” — “Well, guess what? We are not going to do that here!” What he’s after is “complete flexibility and multi-directionality”: you build your own lines from the materials.

What’s inside

Four sections, roughly in ascending order of fun.

Section I — What A “C” Can Be (37 pages) examines a single note from every harmonic angle: the root of all “C” chords with their scale choices, a member of seven diatonic scales and their modes, a chord tone over every possible bass note, then harmonic rhythm and harmonic regions, and finally Part 5, “The Concept of the Strong Beats.” Finnerty knows this section is dense — a shaded note in the introduction literally grants you permission to “skip the painstaking analysis and music theory contained in Section One” and go straight to the playing, adding, “I think you will find it quite interesting and informative. Fascinating, even. If I do say so myself!”

Don’t skip Part 5, though. The strong-beats concept is the load-bearing wall of the whole method: in 4/4, beats one and three are “the most important beats to accent when it comes to stating (or implying) the harmony,” and “if we can be sure to place a chord note on each STRONG BEAT, we will be able to do almost anything else in between, while still retaining the overall harmonic strength of our improvisation!” He demonstrates on Coltrane’s “Moment’s Notice” — “which I strongly suspect was so entitled because that’s how long you have to think about switching keys while playing on it!”

Section II — Mastering The Changes works through the individual chord, the II-V, the minor II-V, then a six-part anatomy of the dominant chord: the basic V7, the 7b9, the 9th and 13th extensions, “flipping” the 13th chord into a 7(#5#9), the 7(#11), and the 7(b5)/7(#5). A chapter on triad transformation follows — major, minor, quartal, and augmented triads over changes, with a Triad Reference Guide — then diminished chords. The II-V material is built from four-note arpeggio fragments, workable because — as he points out — “A note from one chord’s arpeggio is never more than a whole step away from a note of the following chord.”

Section III — Playing On Tunes: The Harmonic Approach is where it pays off. “The key is CHOICES,” he writes, and then shows those choices on real forms: a three-chord Bb blues he christens “Barry’s Blues” (“Since I just wrote it, I believe I will call this one…”), progressively expanded with upper extensions — Dm7b5 and Abmaj7b5 lines over Bb7 — and substitutions; then minor blues, rhythm changes, and Coltrane’s Giant Steps and Countdown, including his own Countdown contrafact “Count Up” from his 1996 Straight Ahead CD.

Section IV — Harmonic Vocabulary is nearly half the book: paired major triads a whole step apart (over mixolydian, then over 7#11 and altered dominants via melodic minor), minor and augmented materials, “Tons of II-Vs!” written out chromatically through all the keys, a 24-page “The Dominance of Dominants!”, “Turnaround Corner!” (the first eight bars of rhythm changes in all twelve keys), and other combinations. A two-page Chord/Scale Index closes the book, ending with the driest joke in it — for “anything else,” the recommended scale is “the chromatic scale!!”

Strengths

• The strong-beats principle. One sentence of theory that instantly diagnoses why a solo sounds harmonically mushy. Of everything in both Finnerty volumes, this is the idea I use most, both in my own playing and with students.
• Harmony as color. Chord tones as “primary colors,” extensions and alterations as “more exotic harmonic shades” — and the genuinely mind-loosening observation that “every note has the same number of possible uses, harmonically speaking, as every other.”
• Application on real forms. Blues, minor blues, rhythm changes, Coltrane changes — Section III supplies exactly the context Book I refused to provide.
• Build-your-own-licks pedagogy. The recurring assignment is to assemble lines from arpeggio fragments yourself, “slowly and carefully” — vocabulary you construct sticks in a way vocabulary you copy never does.
• Bandstand voice. Grace notes added “for the sake of soulfulness,” photos from Crusaders gigs, the caption mourning his sold ’59 Les Paul. You’re studying with a player, not a professor.

Weaknesses

• Section I is a slog, and Finnerty’s own “painstaking analysis” disclaimer confirms he knows it. The chatty, exclamation-heavy prose charms me in small doses and wears thin over 190 pages.
• Relentless eighth notes. Like Book I, virtually every example is an unbroken eighth-note line. Rhythm, space, and phrasing — half of what makes a solo breathe — are entirely your problem.
• Nothing for the left hand. A single treble-clef line for all instruments means pianists get no voicings and no comping context, and bassists are transposing all day.
• The written-out irony. Book I’s core discipline was “transpose everything yourself.” Here, much of Section IV arrives pre-written in all twelve keys. Convenient — and it quietly invites reading over knowing, the very trap Book I was built to avoid.
• No audio. Unlike Book I, there’s no demonstration CD or play-along material; every line sits mute on the page until you make it groove.

How to actually practice with this book

1. Start in Section III, not on page 1. Take Finnerty’s own permission slip: get playing on the blues material, and use Section I as reference reading afterward.
2. Run the strong-beat drill weekly. One standard, metronome on, one full chorus placing a chord tone on every one and three — nothing else required. Then allow anticipations, as he demonstrates. This is the fastest solo-tightening exercise I know.
3. Do the assembly assignments. In the II-V chapter he tells you to build your own licks from four-note arpeggio bits, one bar at a time, then move through the keys. That instruction is the book; the written-out pages are just examples of compliance.
4. Sing before you play. The method assumes you know “the exact notes that make up every chord you are likely to see” — but knowing and hearing are different skills. Sing each arpeggio first, and drill chord-quality recognition away from the instrument (I use chord ear training for exactly this; The Real Easy Ear Training Book covers the same ground on paper).
5. Re-rhythm everything. End each session by displacing the week’s lines, breaking them into triplets, cutting holes in them. The eighth-note grid is scaffolding, not architecture.

How it compares

• vs. The Serious Jazz Practice Book: melody there, harmony here — an intentional pair. Book II stands alone better than Book I does, though Finnerty himself recommends reviewing Book I’s diatonic 7th chord and arpeggio sections “as a prelude to, or accompaniment for, this book.” If you’ll only buy one and you already have decent technique, buy this one.
• vs. The Jazz Theory Book (Levine): Levine explains and catalogs; Finnerty drills. Levine tells you what lydian dominant is and where it came from; Finnerty makes you play B/C over Bb7#11 until it’s reflex. Levine is the broader reference; Finnerty is the better practice partner.
• vs. Connecting Chords with Linear Harmony (Ligon): Ligon distills chord-tone soloing into three elegant outlines; Finnerty sprawls across every extension and alteration. Ligon is the cleaner on-ramp; Finnerty is the more complete vocabulary once you’re on the highway.

Rating breakdown

Criterion	Score	Why
Clarity	4/5	Plain-spoken and well organized, but Section I is dense and the prose runs chatty.
Depth	4.5/5	From one note to Coltrane changes; the dominant-chord anatomy alone justifies the price.
Practicality	4/5	Strong-beats rule and assembly assignments are instantly usable; rhythm and voicings are left entirely to you.
Value	4/5	Years of material in 190 pages — the same gym-membership caveat as Book I applies.
Overall	4.0/5	The application layer Book I was missing. Buy the pair, but practice this one.