Impressive technical abilities for a child, still a hack painting. The universal plaintive cry is “If they’re that good now, imagine how good they’ll be in ten years!” Well, maybe. There’s a great article on kids and […]
Category: teaching
Jazz language?
Great blog post by Bill Plake: “The Problem With Studying ‘The Jazz Language’”: The other morning I was giving a first lesson to a jazz guitarist ( a university student) and was struck by something […]
Sharing information: two views
“Those who know don’t tell and those who tell don’t know.” — Timeless wisdom from the East, attributed to Lao-Tzu. “All the pros I know freely share their prime locations, techniques and business practices.” — […]
Truth and negativity
This has been sitting in my drafts folder awhile— some thoughts on an older piece from George Colligan’s Jazz Truth blog, a collection of thoughts about negativity, positivity, realism, “telling it like it is”, and […]
The map is not the territory…
…and this is not a pipe. Sometimes I worry that with the things we cover here— and the way we cover them— I give the impression that those are the most important things about learning […]
Completism ad absurdum
x10,000. Go. It’s kind of interesting when someone runs a common concept to its logical conclusion, forcing you to examine the premise of the original thing. In this case, the Stick Control model of practice […]
On Marv Dahlgren’s prodigious output and the purpose of a library
Three bucks to purchase, hundreds of hours to master. As I was idly visiting the Really Good Music Publishing site– the people, you’ll recall, who have reissued several out of print Marvin Dahlgren books- an […]
Lessons are a whole different thing
Metaphor for complexity. It’s easy to wonder if drummers online are giving away the away the entire store with all of the free video lessons, blog posts and whatnot. With such a massive volume of […]
Coordination “kernels”
Here’s one for the teachers. This is an approach I’ve found helpful with students having difficulties with coordination on written patterns in jazz and Latin, and a good alternative/supplement to the usual solution of “slowing […]