There’s just a few more weeks of school left and now’s the time we all start thinking about what we are going to do during the summer. In between family trips and video games, why not practice?

Summer is a great time to do the musical things you don’t always have time to do during the school year. Here’s why:

1. You have more time to practice – trust me, there’s nothing on TV anyway.
2. You can practice the music you want to learn – not what your band director gives you
3. You have the time and flexibility to try new things and experiment

I offer music lessons online via Skype / Google video chat / Facetime and can help you stay motivated, organized, and provide direction.

I offer lessons on Flute, Clarinet, Saxophone and Jazz Improv. You find out all the different types of lessons offered on my website: www.musiclessons.monicashriver.com

To make things even better, I have special summer deals for students, AFM members and AZ band directors available. Check out http://www.musiclessons.monicashriver.com/deals-and-discounts/ for more info!

Last weekend I did a Doubling Clinic with Mike Crotty at the Highland Jazz Festival. This particular festival is in its third year and is one of my favorite festivals. Run by two of my friends, the Highland High School Band directors, Kevin Bennett and Lewis Nelson, it is one of the few festivals where you get a complete experience. Middle school and high school bands of various sizes, instrumentation, and configurations (all are welcome!) perform for a rating and comments from out of state clinicians with the option to compete. Concert Jazz Band from Arizona State University performs with the adjudicators and guest artists in the evening concerts. Local professional musicians and educators provide clinics for the students and the band directors. Guest Artists have included Joe Lovano, John Fedchock, Jeff Coffin, Bobby Shew, and Wycliffe Gordon. These are seriously heavy players.

For me, the best part is the transition I’ve made personally. I started out as a student attending these types of Festivals (about 20 years ago… Yikes!), then being in the college band performing, then being a jazz band director and bringing my own students, then doing a clinic… It’s pretty cool to see that progression and how each step influenced me along the way to make me who I am now. I’m not done either. Next is being a adjudicator and eventually a guest artist.

Speaking of guest artists – one of the highlights of the day was getting to enjoy a clinic and performance by Joe Lovano. Lovano’s clinic was like beatnik poetry. I loved it! (not sure how those high school kids felt, though.) Having only ever heard Lovano on his records, I simply fell in love with his playing live. Especially his ballads. Man, that guy is one of the best ballad players I have heard – he played a tune based off Body and Soul changes and I melted. So beautiful!

Mike and I had a great great time doing the clinic. It’s fun to talk about something that we both feel so passionately about and enjoy doing. We hope to do many more of them. I’ve included our handout at the bottom of this post for you, if you’d like. In addition, I made some new friends – great players and educators: Erik Applegate, Robert Morgan, and Matt Olson. One of the best parts about doing things like this is meeting new people from all over the country. I’m so fortunate to be a part of this community of musicians who love, teach, and perform jazz.

Doubling Clinic PDF

Welcome to Five Link Friday – the fun Friday post where I hip you to five of my favorite links of the week. Please feel free to share your own favorite links in the comments below!

1) Chris Potter transcription of Confirmation – my dear friend Adam just posted this on his website and it’s ridiculous. If you love Chris Potter (I do!) then check this out. Insane! Adam has other transcriptions worth checking out too.

2) Next week I’m attending the North American Saxophone Alliance Conference. Luckily it’s close by this year – at Arizona State University. I really enjoy going to conferences (and I’m both performing and doing a Panel Discussion at this one). Derek Sivers has a great post how to get the most out of SxSW, but it applies to any conference. http://sivers.org/sxsw

3) Ten Do’s and Dont’s of Career Building By: Edna Landau

4) Chamber Music America – My group, Doublers Collective, just joined CMA and the organizatio0n really has a lot to offer. I’m excited about learning more and meeting other chamber music ensembles and musicians.

5) Fan Funding – 9 steps to find patrons completely on your own

There’s been an interesting debate about using fundraising platforms like Kickstarter among musicians lately and Disk Makers sent this out in their newsletter this week. Food for thought.

Have a great weekend!

Welcome to Five Link Friday – the fun Friday post where I hip you to five of my favorite links of the week. Please feel free to share your own favorite links in the comments below!

1) Free Flute Sheet Music – http://www.flutetunes.com/ – Free music, including midi and accompaniment. Worth bookmarking!

2) Are You Making These 20 Mistakes on Your Blog?

3) Workflow Tutorial for the Collaborative Internet Musician by Rob Michael Great article on virtual recording sessions and collaboration.

4) 10 Truths From 10 Established Artists On Making It In Music [Free eBook]

5) Blog post about Ernie Watts – short and sweet, but as a doubler, I got a kick out of it.

Welcome to Five Link Friday! This is where I post 5 of my favorite links from the week. I hope you enjoy and please check out the FLF’s from previous weeks. If you have a favorite link please post it in comments!

(Sorry I missed last week – it was one of those insane weekends full of gigs, rehearsals, and clinics that never ended. It’s the life of a musician – you enjoy the insane busy times, because quiet is just around the corner.)

1) 11 Top Ways To Create Compelling Music Video Content

2) From the newly formed Facebook group called Woodwind Educators – http://melmartin.com/html_pages/edu.html

3) The Importance Of Keeping The Same Band Members by David Liebman

4) Why Every Jazz Enthusiast Should Join the Jazz Education Network By Pete BarenBregge

5) Why LA Club Owners Are Totally Lost and Some Advice For Them From a Professional Musican by Dave Goldberg. A great article and definitely work thinking about.

La Club Owners

Welcome to Five Link Friday! This is where I post 5 of my favorite links from the week. I hope you enjoy and please check out the FLF’s from previous weeks. If you have a favorite link please post it in comments!

1) Highland Jazz Festival

This is an annual event that happens here in Phoenix and I’m really excited to be a part of it this year. Mike Crotty and I will be doing a clinic on Doubling and it’s going to be fun, entertaining, and educational. I’m also excited to hear John Fedchock and Joe Lovano perform during the evening concerts. Check out the site – tickets are insanely cheap.

2) How to Play Jazz Exercises Jerry Bergonzi on his Teaching Style JazzHeaven.com Video Excerpt

3) A Guide to Free Online Saxophone Lessons – one of my favorite online friends and part of my panel discussion on social media during the NASA conference next month, I love Doron’s site. This is a great article – it’s nice to have all those resources in one place!

4)  Violinist Has Classy Reaction To Phone Interruption – this has been going around my community of musicians friends and I finally got around to watching it. I love it. There’s lots of ways to deal with “technology disruptions” in a musical setting… sometimes I’m thankful I play jazz and usually can’t hear a cell phone ringing anyway.

5) I’m a Local Biz. I Don’t Need to Be Online…Do I? – I have this discussion with musicians all the time about getting a website up – but it really applies to all small businesses. (Sorry musicians, you’re a business. Yes you’re an artist, but you’re a business too. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing.)

Imagine walking thru the hallways of a hotel conference center and around every corner is live jazz. Imagine people of all walks of life – students to the jazz greats and everything in between milling the halls, chatting with one another, smiling. Imagine having your choice of clinics to attend – technology, promotion, practicing, etc. Imagine all this opportunity and excitement available o you from 8 AM until 2 AM the next morning… This is what it’s like at a JEN conference. It’s completely amazing.

I’m going to do a series of blog posts about the conference to keep them short and manageable.

FAVORITE PERFORMANCES!

I didn’t get to hear everything I wanted to hear, more or less everything I could have heard. I worked to balance my time between clinics, performances, and the hang / networking. Post-conference people always ask: “What’s the best thing you heard?” Which is never an easy answer when you’ve just been saturated with incredible music for almost 4 days straight! But this year, one group stood out to me:

The Ed Neumeister Quartet with Michael Wolff (piano), John Goldsby (bass), and Danny Gottlieb (drums).

Musically, it was some of the most innovative and creative playing that I heard in a long time. I was transfixed the entire (all too short) 40 minute performance and truly appreciated Ed Neumeister’s writing, especially his arrangement of Take the A Train. Not one of my favorite tunes, but I left liking it again.

My second favorite was the Alan Baylock Orchestra…

Alan’s music just makes me happy. And it has ever since I was introduced to his music when I was in college, and now I’m lucky enough to call him a friend. Alan loves music and it shine through in everything he writes. I left that performance smiling and happy.

Missed Opportunity:

At a conference like this, there’s always something that you miss that you wished you’d seen. Or many somethings. You can’t see it all but you really do wish you could. This year I missed seeing the Bass Extremes featuring Victor Wooten and Steve Bailey. I remember seeing Victor Wooten live maybe a decade ago and loved it. I loved the book he wrote – The Music Lesson – too. I wish I had seen that performance and I know it was awesome, because lots of people told me it was one of their favorites.

Welcome to Five Link Friday #3. Enjoy!

1) The 2012 NEA Jazz Masters Awards Ceremony & Concert Webcast

2) One of my favorite videos on why we need to fail to succeed.

3) Think Twitter is a waste of time? Can’t find the point? Here’s a good article explaining how to use it and what’s its good for.

http://diymusician.cdbaby.com/2012/01/twitter-tip-for-musicians-patience-is-a-virtue/

4) http://blog.commpro.biz/thehiringhub/?p=1399
Tips on Networking. 5 easy to follow ideas that are good reminders in this day and age.

5) http://www.feelgooder.com/self-promotion-tips-for-nice-people/ – the title says it all. You don’t have to be a jerk to successfully promote.

First, a little background… I remember learning how to play piano as a kid (and later in college when you have to take 2 years of piano as part of a music degree) and one of the things that stuck with me was the Five Note Scale Pattern where you put your thumb on middle C and played the five white notes in a row. Even years later, I’d catch myself going up to a piano and that’s the first thing I would play.

While teaching, I always started with 5 notes. Which 5 notes varied depending on the instrument, but I would always make a game out of it for the kids. For the more advanced kids we would do 5 note patterns in major and minor and work on switching keys quickly and easily. In my own practicing, I eventually expanded it to what I’ll show you in this post.

I like practicing five note patterns because they work on the transition between tetrachords. See my post on tetrachords. Note that even though the exercise is written in 8th notes doesn’t mean it has to be played quickly. Since I primarily use it for warming up, I play it very slow, all slurred, and really focus on air support, smooth fingers, and what each pattern sounds like.

There are five different tonalites: Major, Minor, Diminished (WholeHalf), Super Locrian (7th Mode of Melodic Minor), and Augmented.

I definitely recommend memorizing this as soon as possible. Then you can listen to the color of each five note scale piece and what happens to that color when even just a pitch gets altered. It’s a listening exercise as much as finger practice.

Download Five Note Scale Pattern Warm-up in all 12 keys.

Welcome to Five Link Friday #2. If you missed the first one, you can find it here.

1) “My goal in life is to play better tomorrow then I did today” – James Moody

Check out the other videos from that same interview.

2) At the JEN conference last weekend I met a trumpet player named Craig Fraedrich. Check out his Educational Materials on his website

3) If This Then That – ifttt.com It’s a cool little website that lets you set triggers that create responses. The concept is really cool, but I’m still trying to figure out how it all works. I’d love to hear what anyone else using it thinks. It was recommended to me at a clinic at the JEN / TI:ME conference last weekend.

4) Great video on why we need music education in our schools:

5) http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~keller/jazz/improvisor/ This is another new thing that I just discovered. It’s very new to me and I’m still experimenting, but looking forward to seeing what it can for me and my students. Anyone out there familiar with it who’d be willing to give me some tips?