Christmas Jazz: Jazz Guitar Chord Melody Solos

A couple of the songs are doable with a little bit of know-how to customize some of the shapes or making substitutions. Most of them I was not interested in learning, or they didn't work for me (didn't sound like the song, or too difficult). It would be a great help if the chord shapes were shown, and even some explanation about chord soloing, or substitutions, would probably be appreciated by most readers. For example, the song melody could be included to study before jumping right to the chords, or guide-tones could be highlighted. The lyrics would help a lot to give some context of your place in the song. I don't think the Vince Guaraldi pieces translated very well.

This books has some nice solo jazz guitar arrangements of popular songs. I have a couple books by the same publisher/author for solo jazz guitar and they are great, especially if you are looking for easier arrangements to get started with. I usually take these as starting points and build my own around them. If you want some more matured/complex arrangements you might want another series.....Jaime Findlay for Christmas Jazz guitar is great for the harder ones.

Not a good example of this series of books. I tried some of the arrangements -Auld Lang Syne, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, White Christmas - was not motivated to continue. Very basic arrangements.

This is a good book for the season but you may need to work on some of the arrangements.

Chord melody jazz books have generally been a huge disappointment, leaving me doubting my abilities and thinking I’d never get any better. I’ve just received the Christmas Jazz book and have achieved more in an hour than I have in five years plus. A huge part of this is that I know a good number of the pieces already. I’m more familiar with Christmas than jazz standards. The arrangements are well written and use pretty simple chord shapes. Yes you’ll need to practice them but the reward to effort ratio is high. If you’re struggling getting started with CM then these are perfect. Even in September😁. Start with Auld Lang Syne.