My fellow musicians, you don’t have to be afraid of sight-reading. That piece of paper in front of you containing large handfuls of new notes and other little markings is not as complex as it seems. They’re the same notes you know and love, just in a different order with slightly different instructions. Most musicians […]
Discover Your Music Connections
I just had a very cool discussion about music with my relatively new boss. When I told him I play trumpet, he told me about a couple of his family members from earlier generations, one of whom performed with Louis Armstrong. My boss also played alto sax in his school jazz band, and his daughter […]
Common Musical Slang
We musicians can sometimes be a strange bunch. Take the lingo: We throw around words like “gig,” “axe,” “riff,” and lots of other slang terms for musical events and items. If you are not used to it, this specialized vocabulary can be as confusing as a webmaster talking about search engine optimization, or a writer […]
Not Close Enough
These days, the saying “Close enough for jazz” has less meaning for me than it did when I first heard it. One thing that gets on my nerves is when non-jazz musicians assume that playing jazz does not require accuracy – it most certainly does. Randomly throwing together a collection of notes and ignoring the […]