I have played various percussion instruments and in multiple styles/genres for many years, was trained at an early age to read music (French Horn at 10 years old) but have been out of it for almost 20 years.

A few days ago (after about a year of seriously focused visualization) a friend I haven't seen in 30 years gave me a 3 octave, Leedy and Ludwig Marimba in functionally perfect condition. It's a little funky in the paint department (gold and beige spray painted!), but the keys are all solid and none of the tubes are bent... it sounds great.

Okay, here's the point... I need a good book that will get my left brain started with chord structure, scale exercises and mallet technique and also has charts for some jazz standards (Monk, Brubeck, Jobim, etc... ) to keep my monkey brain happy.

Any suggestions are welcome, thanks for your time... t (Tom Meyer, near Atlanta Ga. USA)

Here's two books that I don't have but I took a long look at them and they look good.

"The Vibes Realbook" A. Lipner

"Jazz Mallets" A. Lipner

For the Latin stuff here's a good guitar book but it works great for mallets:

Afro Cuban Montunos for Guitar. Carlos Campos

Good luck!