Recap: For over a year, I’ve been investigating chiptune music. I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned about myself, my music, my creative process and more. I hope some of this is relevant to you. Thanks for reading. Here’s an excerpt of one of my own chiptunes. It’s my chiptune remake of my Myriad3 arrangement of […]
Recap: For over a year, I’ve been investigating chiptune music. I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned about myself, my music, my creative process and more. I hope some of this is relevant to you. Thanks for reading. Here’s an excerpt of one of my own chiptunes. It’s a remake of Dan Fortin’s tune Myriad. From […]
Before I write about chiptunes, I have two points of introduction. First of all, check out Kind of Bloop, especially Shnabubula’s version of All Blues, that guy’s a whiz. This is a good starting point for jazz musicians interested in chiptunes. Secondly, some news: I recently bought a Nord Stage EX. This was a big […]
This post is in response to the discussions regarding jazz students’ attendance at jazz concerts. I teach privately at the University of Toronto, and usually have between one and four piano students studying with me during the academic year. My students rarely attend my performances. I can think of one or two instances in my […]
“The details of any art form—how to play the violin, how to improvise a raga, how to write English prose, how to make movies, how to teach are of course particular; each instrument or medium comes with its own language and lore. But there is a kind of metalearning, a metadoing that transfers across styles […]
Suppose your raison d’être is to perform Oscar Peterson solos note for note. The potential for creativity and innovation here is endless. First of all, nobody’s doing this. Even if there was, he/she wouldn’t be able to mimic Oscar exactly; there would always be room for “improvement.” Improvement would require creative, innovative thinking. Innovation is […]
How do you travel to the grocery store? Consider your mode of transportation, route, pace, time of day, choice of clothes and anything else related to getting from point A to point B. Consider which of these variables remain fixed for each trip, and which are flexible. For example, you may always walk to the […]
A few months ago, I wrote a series of posts on creativity, deliberate practice and structure. I’m actually quite excited about these posts; they seemed to have set a foundation for more thoughts and writing. For this reason, I’ve compiled them into one long post so its easier to read and easier for me to […]
Something occurred to me the other day. If you recorded and analyzed how I spend time during lessons, you would see that most time is spent talking and discussing. Very little time is spent playing. When I compare this to how my university piano teachers conducted my lessons, the observations are the same: lots of […]
Editors’ Note: This is a guest post from Josh Rager of XYJazz. “Hurry….hurry….hurry harrrrrrrrrrd” Anyone watch curling? One of the themes of my blog XY…Jazz is information versus knowledge. In the context of being an improvising musician this means what comes out in one’s soloing is what one has learned, what one currently knows. Where I […]