Chick Corea Concert in Calgary
Multiple Grammy Award winning jazz pianist/keyboardist/composer Chick Corea is performing in Calgary on November 25 at the Jack Singer Concert Hall.
Chick Corea is known for his work in jazz fusion.
Head to Ticketmaster's website to order tickets.
I'm looking forward to watching and listening to a jazz great in action.
(c) 2007 by Musespeak(tm), Calgary, AB, Canada. All rights reserved.
It's Beginning to Look a Lot Busy Season
As merchandisers will tell you, there are only 32 shopping days left before Christmas.
Any musician will tell you that right after Halloween, we have mere weeks before we are up to our eyeballs with Christmas concerts and party gigs. I'm currently working my Christmas gig repertoire back under my fingers, along with some of the songs from Conservatory Canada's Contemporary Idioms syllabus. Well, I'm finding that it's one thing to stay a couple of pages ahead of my students. It's a complete other story getting their songs up to performance standard.
In the end, some of the new songs won't make the cut this season. They'll be replaced with old standbys with a twist. For instance, I've discovered that God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen sounds very nice with a Latin pattern or a Boogie Woogie pattern and that Blue Christmas sounds neat with a Honky Tonk bass.
Be brave. Next time you practice your holiday music, add some zip to your songs by changing it a bit. You'll find it entertaining and quite enjoyable.
(c) 2007 by Musespeak(tm), Calgary, AB, Canada. All rights reserved.
Adding Passion to your Technique
Today, my student L came to her piano lesson a little on the grumpy side. Blame it on her homework and group projects. We tried something today that was rather fun - we added a bit of passion to her technical exercises.
We focussed on two keys today - G major and its minor cousin E minor. We wound up staying in E minor since it sounds angrier. I asked her to play me some Angry Scales, Stressed Out Triads and Frantic Arpeggios. She was rather convincing in conveying her emotions of the day. The way she made her triads zigzag really sounded like a stressed out person running in one direction and rapidly turning to run the other way. Ditto for her arpeggios.
After venting her frustrations through her technique, L's rendition of Can You Feel the Love Tonight? was sufficiently tender, Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree was perfectly boogie-ish, while Beethoven's Ecossaise was positively perky.
Now I'm willing to bet that if I had her start with Can You Feel the Love Tonight?, it would have sounded like someone yelling.
I tried the same tactic with a few more students tonight to great success as I had quite a few students stressed out from homework. I think I'm going to give it a try with my own technical exercises.
At the end of L's lesson, I wished her well with her school projects and expressed my hope that within a few days, she'll be able to practice some Happy Scales, Excited Triads and Lazy Arpeggios.
(c) 2007 by Musespeak(tm), Calgary, AB, Canada. All rights reserved.
Note Reading Geography Help
Some of my students are having trouble associating a note written on the staff with its corresponding note on the keyboard, regardless of how many times I say, "The farther it is from middle C on the staff a note is, the farther away it is from middle C on the keyboard."
For example, they do identify the note correctly on the staff as a "B" but when I ask them to play the corresponding note, they pick any "B" on the keyboard. Well, Middle B is written on a different part of the staff from Treble B, which is nowhere near "Really Low B" or "Really Really High B". See what I mean?
The Piano Player is a game is for them and for all music students struggling with this.
(c) 2007 by Musespeak(tm), Calgary, AB, Canada. All rights reserved.
