Jazz Lessons Online
When I was 14 years old, I wrote a letter to the great jazz pianist Chick Corea, asking “I can’t believe you’re actually making this stuff up on the spot. Can you please tell me if this is so, and if so, what the secret is?” I never heard back, but I set forth to learn to play jazz for myself, and after a lot of years at it, I’ve developed an approach to learning improvisation that answers these questions and gets students up and running quickly with a great foundation. And much of what I’ve learned through years of teaching jazz lessons I’ve shaped into “physics principles”. Figuring out these principles was what really put me on the map as a professional touring and recording musician, and they are the basis of what I do in the jazz lessons I teach.
We don’t learn to surf by just sitting on our surfboard in the garage, or reading about the experience; we need to be in motion to get a feel for the dynamic of riding a wave (and to figure out how fun and inspiring it can be), and the same applies when we learn to play jazz! If a student hasn’t yet dug in to improvisation, my jazz lessons are about getting them improvising as quickly as possible using these simple principles; we can be making music that sounds great much quicker than most people realize. If a student is already on their way as a soloist, it’s amazing how certain kinds of awareness can help put their playing into focus, making their playing more effortless and intuitive (See this lesson in Keyboard Magazine for just one of these ideas). I played for a lot of years and took a LOT of jazz lessons before these ideas were shown or occurred to me, but my career as a professional musician didn’t take off until the light bulb went on, I got these principles under my fingers, and they are now the basis of my lessons on improvisation.
View from my chair, playing at the Hollywood Bowl with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Carlos Santana, Marcus Miller
Study Music Production in Logic
I have done dozens of workshops around the world in the art of computer-based PRODUCTION as well. For students interested in this, the art of creating a track from scratch, either with live musicians or purely computer-based, I have found this to be a great experience and a great motivator! It’s also a window into the idea of creating your own CD (particularly in combination with jazz lessons to illuminate how to PLAY on the tracks). So for students who are interested beyond the playing aspect, I heartily encourage that we dive in and learn this other side of the experience. Making a career in music, especially, involves precisely these skills: knowing how to add and optimize our dimension to a piece of music is hugely facilitated by understanding how a track is put together in the first place. In every great band I’ve worked with, I can point to any musician and say “that person is a great producer” even if they’ve never produced a single tune: they all THINK like producers; they hear the big picture and selflessly add to it. And THAT is one thing I can consistently identify as something that gets us HIRED!
To me, really great improvised music is to me one of the highest expressions of the human potential. It’s a fusion of extreme mental acuity, great physical dexterity, a lot of determination and discipline and, more than anything else, a very liberal dose of what’s best about the human soul. It asks a question of who we are and who we can be, who we can become if we apply ourselves to spending our lives growing. From the most technical aspects of music to the most atechnical (did I just make that word up?) probings of our inner cosmos, I enjoy the hell out of working to turn on light bulbs in the jazz lessons I teach. It has been, and continues to be, a great voyage of discovery for me, and I like to see my students experience that as well.
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