A musician's guide to understanding and improvising with rhythm. This book is a road map to rhythm for any musician. It's for guitar players intrigued by the rhythms of world music. It's for keyboard players who've studied scales and chords and now want to study rhythm in a systematic way. It's for drummers, bass players, and sax players who want to groove and solo with a deeper understanding of rhythmic structure. Whatever your instrument, if you want to play funkier and don't mind using your head to do it, this book is for you. This step- by-step comprehensive course includes: hundreds of patterns drawn from African and Afro-Cuban rhythms explained and organized according to their structures; Rhythmic concepts and techniques you can use to create your own patterns; Bite-sized lessons arranged in order of difficulty; Easy-to-read charts that even non-musicians can under- stand; A CD that creates a realistic, three-dimensional rhythmic context for you to practice in; Exercises to reinforce your under- standing and help you build on what you're learning; and a chapter on rhythm walking--a fun way to create rhythms with your whole body while you walk.
