Mark Levine's The Jazz Piano Book

My piano playing is certainly not all it should be, so I put The Jazz Piano Book by Mark Levine on my Christmas Amazon wish list. (This is how we do present buying in my family these days - perhaps some of the excitement is lost, but people do actually receive presents which they want, and no-one has to traipse around the shops on Christmas Eve.) And sure enough, one of my lovely sisters generously clicked on it.

Flicking through, I came across this bit, which I really liked:

Sitting at the piano for eight hours every day may not make you a better musician if you're not practicing the right things. As an example, I once discovered a method book of strange intervalic exercises. It was rumored that 'Coltrane practiced out of this book,' much as it was rumored that 'Bird practiced out of Nicolas Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales' in the 1940s and 50s. It took me about six hours to go through the book the first day, but after a week I was going through the book about six times a day, driving my neighbors bananas I'm sure. Finally, someone walking past my door shouted 'For Pete's sake, play a bossa nova!'