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What are the jazz notes? Seriously, what are the notes that distinguish jazz from other styles of music? What notes are different in...

Humans seem to be hard-wired to move from left to right, top to bottom. It seems like a basic literacy concept so formally in-grained...

Last fall, we featured a series of blog posts on transcribing. This was an important series and it laid out many of the basics of the...

A contrafact is simply a new melody on an existing chord progression. There are tons of contrafacts and certainly this idea is not...

If you have a Real Book, check out the melody to There Will Never Be Another You. I will save you some time. You will see the melody to...

Learning tunes is where technique meets creativity. This is where the melody and the harmony This is where we get to put it altogether...

Here is a quick 3-step strategy to memorizing any jazz standard: repetition, repetition, repetition. I mean....yes, and no. It is true...

So this may sound a little cliche' but the best tunes to learn are the ones that you are most excited about. I used to spend a lot of...

A musicians repertoire is like the chef's recipe's. This is largely what gives us our identity as a musician. We can amass serious...

Have you gotten the ads from the "get in shape" crowd? I have, and it always feels strange to me. It isn't that I don't think I need it,...

It doesn't happen often. But when it does I know it. Despite my intentions my fathers words come out of my mouth. These aren't bad...

John Coltrane is the gold standard of pursuit. Coltrane's story focuses a lot on the last decade of his life. His pursuit of music was...

I have had the benefit of falling in love with a lot of jazz musicians. Some are similar, but generally I fall in love with each one for...

I have been thinking a lot about influences. How they change, and how they don't. How we can be initially inspired in a flash and then...

There is a lot of focus among improvisers on the third phrase of the blues, and rightly so. This is the phrase that pulls the first two...

There is always jazz for every Occassion. Below is some selected music for the thanksgiving holiday. Vince Guaraldi - Thanksgiving Theme...

Last week's blog post focused on the first phrase of Lester Young's solo on Pound Cake. This post is going move into the second phrase...

Transcribing solos (or parts of solos) is the single most important thing you can do to develop your skill as a jazz musician. But I am...

The next several blog posts will work through a chorus of a Lester Young Solo. I am going to break this solo down phrase by phrase and...

Part two of this series takes a look at some of material to transcribe. If you are reading this, you probably already know that...