Fickle Ears

Given all the blather about the before, during and after of my CalArts sojourn, you're probably wondering what, if anything, I actually ...

City of Minneapolis inspectors evidently have claimed another casualty, this time the Riverview Cafe and Wine Bar , a lovely establishment r...

In many ways, the day jobs I have held have engaged, challenged and utilized my entire physical and intellectual capacities to a much greate...

Being a musician is not my "dream." My "dream" was to be a professional baseball player, something farfetched enough, in...

It is in one sense quite odd to me, and in another not at all, that the prescription for musicians to make friends with their audience tends...

"...but would you rather listen to Bach or Vivaldi after a long day at work?" Um...is this a trick question? My name is Stefa...

Scroll to the bottom of this page for tangible, real-world utilitarian proof that post-tonal theory should be more widely taught and unders...

Upon running into a non-musician CalArtian friend before a concert and learning that she is attending in order to hear the work of a musicia...

Happy New Year, enjoy the Month below, don't worry about seeking an explanation, yada yada yada. Look for some exciting changes to Blog ...

"Acquiring a familiarity with a particular style of improvisation frequently involves performing the same piece, or limited group of pi...

The blessing and the curse alike of improvisation is that what goes in tends to be what comes out. I would define improvisational technique ...

For the longest time, I didn't read anything I wasn't assigned to read and often skirted the requirements on top of it. It's bec...

Linkinrunn is a Finnish word dating from the eighteenth century, when ironic messages about quotidian local goings on were commonly left in ...

While I more or less rejected from the outset the idea of learning tunes solely out of professional obligation, I sense something of an impa...

At the risk of deflating what little intrigue I might create here once a month, I'd like to make the implicit explicit just one more tim...

The idea of "strong" and "weak" progressions is more discussed in classical than jazz theory, and jazz people might supe...

Trumpeter and blogger Stephen Haynes writes this of the late Bill Dixon: "The landmark mid-sixties recording Intents and Purposes was ...

Timed comments let your friends and fans give you valuable feedback at specific moments throughout the waveform. Pinpoint exactly what's...

It's winter break and I've spent substantial portions of the last 5 afternoons in the library doing research for an upcoming writing...

So, I checked out some of the NextBop non-jazz stuff. This guy's okay . I'm going to keep an eye on him. It's funny to me that w...

(6) LA Times Love the subterfuge in having eleven entries on the list and two turning out to be ads, including one from Bon Jovi plugging Ma...

Befitting the time of year we presently find ourselves mired in, NPR's A Blog Supreme has come out with its Top 10 Jazz Albums of 2012 ...

"The late twenties trend toward larger groups coincided with replacing the tuba with the bass as the focal point of the rhythm sectio...

Henry Threadgill, god bless him, has become by no particular fault of his own both the patron saint of the tuba in creative music and the so...

[Update 11/28/14: Wow. This entire post is garbage. Almost all of it, anyway. Sorry everyone. I really have been tied in quite the knot over...