Every body is welcome to come Thursday to the University of Delaware For Our Open House. It starts around 2pm.
Take the day off of work and practicing and drive down, come meet, David Friedman, me, Behn Gillece, Mike Pinto, Randy Sutin, all the attendees at the workshop and everyone else who comes!!
Well maybe things are back to normal. Before I go and apologize and tell you guys what happened and everything else I have to say, let me see what's up with my partner.
This was a terrible week for me. I'm still not sure completely as to what happened here.
What a great week I had. What a pleasure getting to meet players from all over the world. This was incredible for me!
First off, let me thank John Daly. Without John this wouldn't be possible. You know Ireland is an amazing place to me. People are helpful and totally down to Earth. John is at the top of the list. He's incredible, I've never really met anyone quite like him. This workshop would not happen without his energy. I was also talking to someone in the workshop who said that the Limerick jazz scene has John to thank as well. He's a mover and shaker!
I had a truly great time at the Ireland workshop - Tony is a master vibraphonist and definitely a missionary preaching the gospel of jazz! I certainly learned a lot from him as well as the other players at the workshop. No man is an island and it is vital to be able to connect with other players in order to grow and mature as a musician. It was quite a blast meeting other mallet players from all across Europe!
I realized after a week of teaching that if I had to boil all this down to a couple sentences, It would be the following:
Do something
Make it into something
Create a finished product and present it
That seems to be the theme of this week. I realize that that's a difficult thing to do, easier to say than to do. If you're gigging then you're doing that all the time, if you're not gigging, then you need to find other ways to do this. That was a big part of this week.
More Lessons are coming, as soon as I get back. I have more from Behn and some from me as well. I'm just too far from my other mac! I'm home monday. But I'm sure there's more than enough stuff here to keep you guys busy until then!
http://store.studymusiconline.com/little-echo
We have Behn's cd in our store and I've heard and it's a GREAT cd. All original compositions, right Behn? And you composed most of them as I remember.
If you want to support Behn, buy his CD. He would appreciate and I know when you hear it you will also!!!
I found this video on Ed Mann's Facebook page this morning of a performance by the CalArts Percussion Ensemble. Nice piece and performance. Click here for the video.
Tom P.
What's great about a workshop, I'm realizing is the concentration of it all. Everybody is out of their environment and together for one reason and that's to talk about the vibes. That was the last four days. Everybody made progress in those four days. They took shifts in the school at night practicing on the 2 Premieres and the Musser (Nico, get VPB to Ireland). We all worked hard, everyone was so cool and supportive.
This has been a great week for me. The 7 vibe players here taking the workshop are great guys and love playing the vibes. So we've been getting into some great discussions about how to learn tunes, playing melodies, separating the parts of the, i.e., the melody, the chords and then the chord melody.