Tag: Chicago piano teacher
Learning taste.
I was watching a video with Vinnie Colaiuta playing in a fusion brass band. Vinnie, if you don’t know him, is one of the great drummer that ever lived. He has played famously for Frank Zappa or Sting among many, many others. He’s a great technician, for sure, but that is not the purpose of…
The conundrum of music.
There are a lot of conundrums in music because it’s a very organic activity, and we are, after all, analog beings, prone to chaotic or non-sensical behavior and thinking. One of the common mystery is speed. Question: how do you work on speed? For fun, I’ll name the 2 common answers I see most often.…
Dry spell in music.
I get them sometimes, but I think differently about them than most of my self-employed colleagues. I think of them as a little respite, almost a vacation that’s beneficial to my sanity. I am talking about dry spells. A dry spell occurs when your phone or your email box doesn’t ring with new prospects, when…
Knowing is freedom in Music.
There was a teacher in Paris that enjoyed a great reputation. Her name was Nadia Boulanger. Her and her sisters were in music since they were born. Nadia Boulanger’s sister, although predestined to be a great concerto player, died in her prime and never saw the fame and fortune her skills promised. Nadia became a…
For a drummer or a pianist sitting hurts.
The tittle of this blog says it all, today’s subject is a pain in the rear. This is a topic not enough talked about, maybe because most of the literature is geared towards beginners the kind of people who do not know yet the joys of aching vertebrae’s. I practice every day. Sometimes 1 hour…
My roots. Part 2
Once my stepfather had paid his dues on a small boat off the coast of Brittany trying to catch a living, we came back to my little village close to Switzerland. It was a very small and charming place where you had the lower part and the higher part of the community divided with one…
How music teaching came into my life.
Young and handsome, proud of my newly acquired skills, I was ready to wrestle the world, and make it bend to my will. I discovered the music world in a small French city that not even French people know. The place sits with a mountain on its back and is surrounded by the lace of…
Developing a singing tone. Part 2.
In part one I divulge the two categories of instruments we find in music: the one that breathe and the ones that don’t. Let’s talk about singing, since this is the title of the blog. In a melody, you get some high and some lows. The notes ascend or descend as the music plays. Let’s…
Developing a singing tone. Part 1.
This one is both serious and funny. In the family of instruments you get the percussion, the woodwind, the singers, the strings and the piano (more on that one later). Among all of these you get two categories: the one that breathe and the ones that do not. A trumpet player cannot sustain an infinite…
My roots. Part 1
When I was young we didn’t have money. We used to burn the furniture in the winter to heat up our place. No central heat, no telephone, no shower. We took a shower at a friend’s place, once a week, we paid 10 francs the shower. It was great. We would hang out with the…