by Jerry Coker, Bob Knapp, and Larry Vincent
The main focus of the book is to help students recognize certain chord progressions instantly. This can be an extremely beneficial skill to both improvisers and composers. As an improviser, sometimes there are playing situations where you don't have a chart in front of you and you might have to take a solo on the whole tune or part of it. This is certainly beneficial when you get into a jam situations as well.
As a composer, hearing chord progressions is an invaluable skill for a few reasons. One is for reharmonization purposes. For example, maybe you've written a melody and you want to repeat it again with a different chord progression. If you could hear your reharmed changes without having to play them first, this can be an extremely time efficient way of writing. Also, it can be really cool to start writing a tune by sketching out a chord progression first and then writing the melody to go through that progression.
Obviously one book is not going to give you perfect ears...it's still a skill that you develop over time. What this book does do is familiarize students with common jazz/pop progressions and use them as a starting point. Specifically----II-V progressions and it's variations. It talks about certain kinds of modulations within a tune, odd beginning chords of a tune, bridges...etc. It also gives many examples of actual tunes that incorporate the topic at hand.
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