Education

Educational Offerings

Beginners Approach to Improvisation

Coming up with music on the spot can be intimidating!  How do you know when and what to play?  How do you know if what you’re playing is working?  What happens if you do it wrong?  These kinds of questions are common for folks to ask at the beginning of their journey as musical improvisers.  The great thing is that these questions all have answers that, while lifelong pursuits to master, are easy to understand.  In this session, we’ll dig into both the theory and the practice of improvisation, starting from square one and building up both our skills and confidence as performers.

An Introduction to Jazz History 

Black American music is one of our nation’s most impactful artistic accomplishments.  From early styles like the blues and ragtime all the way to contemporary pop, rock, and hip-hop, a direct musical lineage can be traced in parallel to the history of our country.  This presentational session combines history with music as we play our way through some of the greatest moments in jazz and beyond.  

Beginners Approach to Listening to Jazz

“What the heck is going on?”  A fair question asked by many a new listener to jazz.  It’s often said that music is a language, or, maybe more accurately, many languages with overlapping vocabulary and syntax.  Jazz, like its native tongue of English, is one of the more complex and often surprising musical languages to understand, with ideas inherited from a plethora of cultural backgrounds and eras of musical history.  In this session, we unpack some of the basics of the musical language and offer a guiding hand as we begin to unravel the inner workings of this beautiful artform.

Feedback for School Ensembles

This session is designed for school ensembles seeking additional feedback and rehearsal guidance.  This is a great fit for ensembles that are putting the finishing touches on their preparations for an upcoming performance, are preparing for an adjudication festival and want to have a test run on their home turf, or are just looking to shake things up with some ideas from a fresh set of ears.  

Section Specific Clinics  

This session is designed for programs in search of guidance and support for a specific section.  Examples might be a rhythm section workshop digging into the specific roles of each instrument and the section as a whole, a saxophone section workshop exploring the particular mechanics of the instrument and how the section functions in the big band, or a trumpet section outlining the various approaches to each chair within the sections and the techniques to best accomplish the goals of each chair.  (We tailor the goals of the sectional to the needs of the specific section with which we’re working.)

Something Else Of Your Design!

Is there something we could offer that would be of use to you/your students/your music program that isn’t described here?  Let us know - we’d love to collaborate with you!