[MC5C]

I'm going to say that being able to read music, and sight read charts, is almost irrelevant to playing jazz except in a few situations. For every icon who was highly educated musically (say Miles Davis) there is another guy who couldn't read music at all (Wes Montgomery, Django Reinhardt). But understanding harmony, by ear or by rote, is almost the root of jazz. That, and time sense - swing. On guitar, sight reading is complicated by the extreme variation of how to place notes on the fretboard to best effect - many notes have three or four places they can be played on the fretboard. Piano - one place per note. A friend of mine was completing a Masters degree in Guitar Performance - so a highly skilled and trained classical guitarist. In one blog post she complained about how guitarists always let the side down when asked to sight-read charts in a band setting. Later in the same post she commented on how she had transcribed a classical piece three months earlier and was now starting to get to grips with how to actually play it on the instrument. The dichotomy struck me - complaining about lack of sight reading expertise (in some of the most highly trained guitarists you will ever find) and needing three months to figure out how to play a piece that she transcribed.