“I think I was first awakened to musical exploration by Dizzy Gillespie and Bird. It was through their work that I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.” –John Coltrane The Musician’s Way, p. 98 In The Musician’s Way, I...
“It’s very gratifying to improvise in front of people. I feel I’m including them in what I’m doing, taking them someplace they might like to go and haven’t been before.” -Jim Hall, guitarist The Musician’s Way, p. 102 Improvisation is the most playful way that we can...
From 2026-2031, the college-age population in the U.S. will decline sharply, about 15%, due to the reduced birth rate during the great recession.* Combine that with competition from online learning, and numerous brick-and-mortar colleges are expected to shut down...
“Don’t give up the dream, but build your competencies so you can pursue many dreams.” -Gerald Klickstein On March 18, 2019, I was pleased to record an interview in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with pianist Kai Talim for his outstanding “Skip the...
“Confident performance is not a fluke, but the product of imaginative and consistent synthesis of technical and emotional work.” -Frank R. Wilson The Musician’s Way, p. 146 Musicians who grapple with performance nerves typically hear plenty of clichéd...
“Three qualities are essential in a professional musician… the first is good health and the other two are the same.” Mark Hambourg, pianist -The Musician’s Way, p. 241 Whether we make music as professionals, students or amateurs, we strive to create transcendent...
“You don’t drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there.” -The Musician’s Way, p. 196 In Chapter 10 of The Musician’s Way, I emphasize that musicians should view errors not as shameful failures but as neutral information. Having such a healthy...
“Advantageous postures have an active quality; they’re always subtly in motion.” -The Musician’s Way, p. 251 In his book, On Piano Playing, Gyorgy Sandor identifies two features of beneficial postures: stability and mobility. That is, they support the weight of...
“It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.” -Ornette Coleman, saxophonist & composer The Musician’s Way, p. 190 In the discovery phase of practice, all of us make errors as we try out interpretive and technical...
