Training in jazz is personally shaped to an individual’s needs, relative to experience and skill.

Jazz is a special process for making music.  It is instrumental and vocal dance and, like dance, cannot be learned academically by way of literature.  Performing with others is engaging in musical conversation, so neither can it be learned sufficiently by playing or singing with recorded music.  Playing with jazz musicians is the most authentic way to learn the process.  

During a lesson the vocal or instrumental student will be accompanied by a professional jazz pianist, which will additionally give the student opportunity to see jazz demonstrated live and explained.  The performer must feel how his or her own musical input is responded to, and how to respond in turn.  Step-by-step examples will be shown on how to build a solo. 

Theory will be studied - chord structure, sequences, voicings - and implemented as the need is indicated.  Concentrating, though, too much on theory before actuation in performance is very much like teaching grammar and syntax before one begins to speak.  First the experience then the analysis. 

Since doing is the best way to retain what has been studied, no time is wasted putting what is learned into practice. Recordings will be made periodically of a student's performance. 

An introductory, this program is for school-aged students who have had little or no experience with jazz, mainly those in the lower grades, but can be geared to the higher. 

This program begins with a piece or two performed on piano, followed by a short talk about jazz, touching a little on its history, its status as America’s most unique contribution to the world’s great musics.  Interspersed throughout will be additional performances of various titles from different periods of jazz - 1920s-present.  The talk can also include the following: how jazz was America’s first universal culture; and, drawing upon personal experience, how it was to perform in racially-mixed groups in segregated southern states and other similar areas in the country in the 1950s.   

There will be Q-and-A near the end, or at any time during the program, depending on the situation. 

Instrumental Clinic - Levels I and II

The focus of this program will be on the primacy of time and the common tone, the note that is common to all the chords in a sequence.  Participants in this level will be encouraged to learn and identify basic triads and scales.  The stress for percussionists, not necessarily needing to know theory, will be on time. 

Following a short piano performance and introductory remarks, participating instrumentalists will then be invited to perform.  A tune appropriate for the task - i.e., having a sufficient chord sequence - will be chosen, leadsheets provided.  Participants will be worked with individually and in group. 

Knowing common tones gives a player - especially one playing on a single-note instrument - a place to go when all else fails - a kind of platform for interim landings.  After that to find common tones for succeeding sequences, and so on, learning to work with those tones and then to shape with common tones a simple improvisational solo relative to the melody. 

Confidence is key to relaxed playing.  Knowing common tones helps build confidence.  Playing relaxed is primary to physical retention of what has been practiced and, consequently, when performing.  As their accompanist, the clinician can also help the player to a deeper feeling of jazz as a music of time - not just a music of notes. 

The focus of this program will contain elements from Level I, but adapted for the more advanced improvisator.  The primacy of time and common tone with this player is more internalized and automatic.  This player knows scales and triads (at least has begun to know them), and is also motivated to delve more deeply into the broad landscape of our harmonic system. 

In early stages of a player’s development, analysis often takes place during the performing.  With the more developed player this ceases.  That is, analysis is left behind during performance.  This is the moment of truth for what the player has learned.  The concentration will be to help the  more advanced player work from the dance of jazz, feeling how notes are secondary to the time in which they are placed. 

Vocalists are accompanied and assisted in the following areas - phrasing, breathing, intonation, and lyric enunciation and delivery.  Attention is paid to repertoire, to picking suitable material, to customizing or individualizing a song - learning to distinguish emulation from imitation - and to working with and responding to the improvisational accompaniment.