Guitar Axis Turnarounds Master Class by Don Mock is probably the most useful and insightful educational book I have ever read concerning playing lead over jazz and blues changes (amazingly even better than Pat Martino's fabulous and necessary book 'Linear Expressions' REH publications). The main reason is that Martino's book is intended to create an intuitive ability to paraphrase the lines (possibly also considerable as master melodies) pertaining to individual chords that he gives you in permutations that modulate to various key applications. Martino probably found the first concise and deliberate way of doing that for, if not most, then, some people. Mock on the other hand makes his lessons - obvious analysis of what is going on with longer progression changes (e.g. turnarounds) and offers a way of dealing with them in a fast, simple, and generalizible way by using what he terms a 'master melody' which you the player can generate yourself from the fundamental scales and arpaggios being played over. This is simple because the turnarounds are stereotypical and therefore your master melodies can be worked out before you encounter the changes. And because its jazz (or the turnaround in a blues) your melodies will be complex enough to those who only hear them (as oppossed to having practiced them over and over) so they will not seem boring or even obviously remembered from song to song. Furthermore, it turns out that turnarounds are not the only useful places for these master melodies because many songs have either extended sections within them made up of turnarounds or can even be entirely made of turnaround changes.
This is a great book, from a great instructor, composer, and player - go ahead, get it! It also comes with a great CD, Don plays all the exercises.
As for Martino's Linear Expressions, I definitely recommend you buy that too. I'm going to adapt the lines in that book (e.g. using octive, thirds, etc. displacements and, substitutions) to turn them into master melodies useful over more than one chord at a time and over more than turnarounds! Sincerely, Gus More [...]
