Saturday, May 19th, 2012

Aaron Parks Blog – not updated regularly, but Aaron throws some pretty cool posts up there every so often.  This is where I found out about NextBop.com described below. AllAboutJazz.com – this is a staple of the jazz community.  This has anything and everything, far too much for me to list in fact.  Definitely take [...]

Ok, so let’s talk about the amazing saxophonist that is Bob Reynolds.  Bob is a graduate of Berklee in Boston and has since played with heavy hitters both in the pop and jazz realm.  He’s got a couple of great albums out that I would highly recommend.  And, his long awaited Stablemates forum has just [...]

For professional musicians and advanced students, this is a fairly obvious statement: equipment matters.  You’ll see a host of jazz, classical, R&B, rock, Latin, etc. musicians all with different equipment and in many different combinations.  For the beginning student, the subject of equipment is rarely discussed even though it is actually fairly simple, plays a [...]

So, I was looking around for certain players’ set-ups recently and was having to hunt more than I thought I should.  A lot of the more modern players’ set-ups, unless they’re endorsed by a particular mouthpiece or reed company, were really difficult to piece together.  Theo Wanne has an excellent set up chart on his [...]

Effortless Mastery – Kenny Werner This book is pretty widely known in the music community.  It’s about… well, check out the book.  This book tackles the mental, physical, and spiritual aspects of creativity.  Kenny uses accounts from his own development as an artist to explain how to think and create effortlessly. There is also a [...]

I got these great sheets from Ben Wendel (of Kneebody) who’s an old Eastman student of Raymon’s. The first sheet shows 1) the harmonic series for Saxophone 2) the harmonic tendencies for Saxophone, Clarinet, and Flute, (those are the weird liny-charty things) and 3) 9 exercises for practicing the harmonic series. The second sheet shows [...]

Welcome to the Transcription page!  Transcriptions are listed alphabetically by first name.  Next to the artist name and song name are some different selections.  Bb, C, & Eb are the different keys that each transcription is in.  The “Score” selection shows each chorus of an artist’s solo on a separate line so you can compare [...]

Continuing with the Aaron-Parks-love from last week’s blog post, I found a very cool jazz blog that actually has the PDF’s of ALL of the charts from Aaron’s debut record “Invisible Cinema”.  Aaron posted the link to this great blog on his MySpace blog called NextBop.com.  I highly recommend that while you’re over there getting [...]

In case you haven’t heard, Joshua Redman has a new collaborative project called the James Farm Band with Aaron Parks, Matt Penman, & Eric Harland.  News from the group’s Facebook Fan Page shows that they’ve been hard at work in the studio and are finished recording for their highly anticipated Spring 2011 release. If you [...]

This is a document that was getting forwarded around DU during my last year.  It’s a small list of very concise, but very important words of advice from Thelonious Monk.  Hope you guys enjoy and let me know if you think anything should be added.