Seattle's music scene is renowned the world over not just for musicians like Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain, and not only because it has a thriving local music scene, but also because Seattle is the home of some of the best high-school music programs in the world. Seattle area public high-schools such as Garfield, Roosevelt & Mountlake Terrace routinely win the top prizes at national and international jazz festivals every year. Seattle's middle school jazz programs do as well.

Seattle has a thriving scene of local jazz professionals and students alike. In 2007, Earshot Jazz will bring these communities together by offering Practice This! Practice This! is a series of articles that will appear in each of the twelve issues of Earshot Jazz Magazine in the next year and on-line as well.

Each month, Earshot Jazz will interview and record a lesson with a different local jazz musician. Each musician will be asked to describe a particular practice technique that young music students can use to improve their jazz playing skills. Each recorded interview will include the artist demonstrating the technique being taught. The recordings will be posted on the Earshot Jazz website for students to download and study. After the interview, an article describing the technique will be published in Earshot Jazz Magazine.

The lessons will be non-instrument specific, and applicable to all students of jazz. They will also provide insight to the readers of Earshot Jazz about how musicians think about and conceive of their craft. There will be lessons by performers on every major instrument and vocalists as well.

Practice This! will help us preserve the techniques and practices used by Seattle's finest jazz improvisers, and help keep jazz alive in our community by sharing the wealth of musical ideas that is present in our local artists.

April 2009

Hadley Caliman on Tried-and-True Techniques

In the second part of our Practice This! series with master tenor saxophonist and Golden Ear Award winner Hadley Caliman, we will look at the days before an organized jazz education system. When Caliman was “coming up” there were no Aebersold play-alongs, no half-speed transcribing devices, and certainly no computers or looping mechanisms, not to mention an abundance of schools or qualified teachers. Instead, Caliman learned the language of jazz and improvisation from a variety of tried-and-true methods that still yield great rewards in today’s technologically advanced world.

Click here to read the Earshot Jazz companion article.

March 2009

Hadley Caliman on Misconceptions about Key and Tonic vs. Dominant

Tenor saxophone giant and recent Golden Ear Award winner Hadley Caliman is one of the few musicians remaining from a generation where there was no formal jazz-education system for young musicians. Practice This! interviewed Caliman about his early jazz education and the common problems he has seen in students during his years of teaching privately and at the Cornish College of the Arts. In our first article of a two-part series, Hadley Caliman discusses misconceptions about key and tonic-versus-dominant, then gives us two exercises to help illustrate his points.

Click here to read the Earshot Jazz companion article.

February 2009
Two Years, Twenty Tips
It’s been two years since the first edition of Practice This! appeared in Earshot Jazz, so we thought it was time to compile some golden nuggets from the many talented musicians who have lent us their time, insight, and knowledge. If making practicing a priority was one of your New Year’s resolutions, you’d be hard pressed to find a better place to start than this group of tips and ideas. Click here to read the Earshot Jazz companion article.