you tell me
Heard about two students discussing the music of John Cage. One said did you know he didn’t write anything? The other said yes he did, lots of things. The first […]
maybe the ginger
Groups of two or three students get into seven groups and each selects one record from a list of twenty. There are seven presentations to schedule between now and Christmas. […]
Listening
Listening to Cecil a Cecil Taylor record from Japan. The concentration the variation. Listening to what isn’t happening. There are no scales in the ordinary sense being played and yet […]
lists
For an ice breaker I asked each of the new students what person, alive or dead, they would invite over for dinner. Their list included Jesus, Frank Ocean, Einstein, Drake, […]
the games
Couple games I like to play with an eight year old. 1/ how long can you go without complaining? 2/ how long can you go without thinking? I try to […]
green banded boodsac
New people enroll in the songwriting class. Some write similar sounding letters apologizing for their lack of talent or lack of experience or just go on about lack of everything, […]
the practice of melodicism
In the first meeting of the faculty, today, they said next semester you must put together a panel and someone else said for now just blue sky it. I do […]
Tianenman Square
Was thinking about next week’s class and how I want to address how music can affect change. Then I thought about asking the students for examples of images that do […]
Trucker Bill and the Good Deed
There was a woman who was a fan of my songs, who out of the blue asked me if she could paint my acoustic guitar, she said she was an […]
bass solo
It isn’t his primordial relationship to percussion or the salacious lyrics. It isn’t the brilliant simple three inversions in the upper piano register (that pepper the whole song) making every […]