What is the true source of happiness?  We look for happiness in all sorts of places. We might look for happiness in the things we do such as our job or in our work. We could look for happiness in our loves and  relationships–in our family or in our friendships, in our children, siblings, or spouse. We sometimes look for happiness in our recreation  an din the things we have or the pleasures we experience in things we do. We might even look for happiness in our worship and religion–seeking happiness through God. Read the rest of this entry »

In my previous blog, I wrote about the importance of teaching and learning improvisation.  Music is a language and while being able to read music is an important skill, being able to express and converse with our musical vocabulary is equally as important and is an ability important to develop.

How can one get started right away? One of the best ways to beginis simple question and answer phrases. These phrases help us come up with simple ideas and we can easily begin to improvise. Many students are surprised how fast they can go from freezing up and not knowing what to play to being able to easily improvise simple musical phrases. This is a great starting place that can lead to many other types of improvisation. Read the rest of this entry »

A part of music that is often neglected in our teaching is improvisation.  Many, many music teachers do not help their students develop skills in improvisation. There are a lot of reasons why this is often skipped.  First, there never seems to be enough time to accomplish everything we want to in a lesson.  As a student becomes more and more advanced, even in a full hour, it is difficult to spend enough needed time on the repertoire let alone other needed skills like technique, vocabulary building like scales, cadences, and music theory let alone improvisation.

While lack of time is probably a very common reason, I believe an even more common excuse why improvisation is not taught is the teacher’s own comfort level with improvisation. Read the rest of this entry »

We first tried this around Christmas. Here is a short sample of a recording Lucas and I made last weekend. Lucas is 12 and in 7th grade.

A little Jazz… Here is Brass Attack by Doug Rasmussen and the ACME Jazz Company from Minneapolis, MN.