BLOG | April 5, 2019

Got up at 5am to watch AHS Jazz A at the “Swing Central” in Savannah, GA with the livestream feed. I thought the kids did great for playing at 8:30am … mind you it’s 5:30am in LA time. Now they’ll know what it feels to be a travel team like the Dodgers, needing to play their best at any time of the day! I’m proud of my students who performed and soloed today. Was able to take snippets of photos from the live feed and posted photos here.
Although the kids at who improved did well at Swing Central, I felt they could have done better and it may be my fault for not having them transcribe at a younger age. It lit a fire in me to start getting my students to start transcribing at a younger age. So today I had 3 students start their first transcription. One 6th grader and two 7th graders. It’s rather fun to find out that kids at this age can hear notes and figure out notes. Here’s the breakdown:
– 7th grader, John K, alto sax started transcribing Willie Bay’s Grammy Audition of Billie’s Bounce. Willie plays very cleanly and it’s easy to hear the notes on his recording and of course we’ll slow the YouTube track down to 50%-75% to hear the 16th notes.
– 7th grader, Kayla B, tenor sax started transcribing “Billie’s Bounce” by Dexter Gordon.
– 6th grader, Aiden B, alto sax started transcribing “Billie’s Bounce” by Phil Woods.
** ALL three kids got past 1 chorus and now their assignment is to go home a memorize what we transcribed and we’ll keep adding more each week for them to transcribe and memorize. I hope to get them through many transcriptions. *** Knowing jazz licks and phrases are like money in the bank. You can pull money out of the bank if it’s not there, and you can’t pull jazz licks from your head if their not there either.That’s my BLOG and scoop for today!

YouTube cool lesson of the day | “What Bach and Charlie Parker had in common” | Rick Beato