Category

Some of you may not be familiar with Mr. Wise, a legend of trumpet playing who has broken barriers in so many ways.

RFC (Request For Comments) was used as the title for most early papers about the internet, and emphasized its collaborative nature.

Don Cherry is a unique figure in the history of American music. Known primarily as a trumpeter, cornetist, and pocket trumpet player, Cherry was also an accomplished composer, one of the first to seriously merge American jazz with music from other parts of the world. He also eventually became a player of many small instruments from around the world, most notably the Malian stringed instrument, the doussn'gouni. As a trumpeter, Cherry played with a poignant, understated melodicism and an intensely creative sense of line that made him a one-of-a-kind player in the history of jazz.

I first heard bassist Mark Dresser perform live at the much storied New Music Monday series at the Alligator Lounge in Los Angeles around 1995.

Ear training is the most valuable training for any musician, and maybe most of all for an improviser.

With so much noise in the air about what jazz music and musicians are becoming, there remains the crucial question: How do you teach/learn improvised music?

This last summer I was given the opportunity to design and implement a music theory curriculum for a new, forward-thinking summer music institute in Los Angeles that some friends of mine had started the previous year.

We're getting closer to the kind of hand-held devices used to convey large quantities of data in the Star Trek series.