One of my favorite time killers when I worked in the music library in college (aside from intensely studying and rubber band wars) was to play games online. This was before the age of smart phones and Angry Birds. Text Twist was one of my favorites. I love word games and I’m especially adept at [...]
Subtitled: How I Finally Learned, Really Learned, My Diminished Scales. Diminished scales were always that elusive sound that I wanted to try to understand but could never get my head around. Actually that was my problem. I could think my way through it, but I really didn’t have it under my fingers. My brain kept [...]
For the last 5 years or so summer has meant “summer reading”. Teachers (and students) are quite familiar with this idea and normally this time of year I am starting my summer reading book with gusto and have every intention of finishing it, complete with post-its tagging important pages and notes in the margins [...]
First a little background: I have a little bit of of a RPG background (Role Playing Game) thanks to various ex-boyfriends and over the years I have collected some of my own dice. During my second year of classroom teaching, I was giving a test on major scales. Because the students were supposed to know [...]
Tetrachords – the little pieces to a rather large puzzle A couple of years ago, a colleague told me that she teaches major scales to young students using tetrachords. This approach was eye opening for me and prompted me to try teaching this method to my 2nd level class for a couple of years. [...]
I’ve never really considered myself a techie but somehow in the last year or so I became not only that person that colleagues come to for computer advice, but someone who has created and maintains 3 websites, 3 Twitter accounts, spends more time on her iPad that the computer (and not just playing games), and [...]
Last weekend I went to NYC to attend the 2010 Surdna Arts Teacher Fellowship convening and spent 2 1/2 days with fellow teaching artists and administrators. It was an incredible experience – one that I will share in more detail at another time. We spent quite a bit of time talking about what it [...]
One of the most amazing parts of attending the Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshop was getting to meet so many fantastic players and educators. I’ll be posting more about my experiences, but I felt like it was best to start with these 6 incredible people – the ones who started it all. One of the most [...]
“All the answers are out there. They’re on the records.“ – Jamey Aebersold During day 2 of the Anyone Can Improvise Seminar, Jamey made some CD suggestions so people could find a place to start when building their collection. (Fun Fact #1: Jamey owns over 15,000 records.) I own most of what he recommended. In [...]
Today was the first day of the Aebersold Summer Jazz Camp in Louisville, KY. Technically, it’s day 2 of my grant journey, and although day 1 was interesting and exciting, I’ll save it for another night. (The 3 hour time different from Phoenix has really messed with my schedule.) Right now, I’ll talk about the [...]
Recommended Jazz Stardards to Learn One of my biggest weaknesses as a jazz player is knowing tunes. (“Knowing” in this case means that you have the melody and chord changes memorized and could play thru both without the use of a Real Book.) Over the years I have gathered many lists and I never [...]
