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My Music Life and Times podcast partner, Kevin Bales, says: “It’s funny how much of what we do musically is not about being perfect and this is not even a jazz genre issue. I love the stories about accomplished classical pianists who will play a wrong note, then repeat the phrase with the correct note…

The underlying purpose of our podcast, Music Life and Times, is to discuss the life lessons that music teaches you and one of those is cooperation, and maybe to take it a step further, collaboration. When you’re playing by yourself you’re pretty much responsible for everything. It’s not just rendering the bass parts and the…

My MusicLifeandTimes podcast partner Kevin Bales, who has taught jazz to students young and not-so-young for more than three decades, advises those who want to learn music to first seek out a teacher they can relate to, who will help them not only learn the rudiments but the pure joy of playing music. I tried…

Of course, there’s no such thing as the three best ways to learn to play music, because everybody learns things their own way. But with all the avenues to learning music today, there are three things to do that should serve almost everyone well. First, about all those ways to learn to play: You can…

Most parents agree that music should be part of their children’s education. Not that they expect Clarissa to sing at Carnegie Hall. But if for no other reason, learning to play an instrument translates to understanding more about how music is made which translates to greater enjoyment from music throughout life. So as a parent,…

In an upcoming MusicLifeandTimes podcast, my partner jazz pianist Kevin Bales and I exchange stories about life on the road as musicians. Unlike most other professions, musicians don’t typically work in the same building every day (or night). Playing different locations means we’re often out of town, away from what we call home. That leads…

The other day I engaged my podcast partner, pianist Kevin Bales, in a discussion of pianists who have influenced him. There were many, he told me, and many more musicians other than pianists whose influences you can hear in his playing. But the one that stands out, at least to me in our discussion, and…

In light of ongoing racial injustice and the Black Lives Matter movement, universities have been pressured to better represent a more diverse music, to include more Black composers. But too often they’re only picking composers who write in the European tradition. Duke Ellington never seems to come up and yet he’s the most important American…

I’m sure you know the song “My Funny Valentine.” It’s from Babes in Arms, a 1937 musical by Rodgers and Hart, and has been recorded more than 1300 times by more than 600 artists, from Frank Sinatra to Sarah Vaughan to Miles Davis to an enshrined version by jazz trumpeter/vocalist Chet Baker. I guess those…

It’s no stretch. Jazz is an expression of democracy. So much so it was outlawed in Nazi Germany, and later banned in the Soviet Union where it was not uncommon to see signs like, “If you let people play jazz they will revolt,” or “if you play saxophone, you’re a degenerate.” What makes jazz so…