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Percussionists At Curtis Institute of Music

They were a little shy, but check out the Curtis Students! I did you my end of semester workshops with them and they rocked!

They have such a great attitude, and are great musicians. Today they were reading down the tune summertime and soloing over it. Before that they were creating improv pieces out of modes. These are students who have done little or no improvising so far. They did a great job! I'll ask them if I can post a couple versions of there Summertimes.

Les Blachut - The Show Must Go On (part 2)

Hi all,

Remember this video I recently posted about vibist Les Blachut and his "adventures" on stage?

If not, you can find it back here:
http://www.vibesworkshop.com/video/vibist-les-blachut-%E2%80%93-show-mu…

Well I got another one from him on Facebook!

Sorry for the poor sound. Just keep an eye up to 1'02, and then 3'10! He just cracked me up! :o)

Newsweek article: "Jazz is Dead. Long Live Jazz"

Hi All,

In Newsweek online, there's an article call "Jazz is Dead. Long Live Jazz" (see http://www.newsweek.com/id/226331). I'm not sure I can decode a coherent message from the article, but one of the comments seems to be about the friction between jazz's pop/dance music roots and it's art music present (and arguably last 40-50 years or so), and judging the quality of today's jazz vs. yesterday's on the basis of popularity is the wrong approach. It also seems to me that the article does better with "Jazz is Dead" than it does with "Long Live Jazz".

A Great Vibe Hang Today!

Man we had a great vibe hang today! Great players and great music! It seemed like we had the whole world together. I counted France, Netherlands, Germany, USA, China and Australia. Pretty cool huh?

It's like we have this growing community now of vibe players who love the instrument and want to play it well. That's really cool to me.

David Friedman said something great about the site. He said, the site was built around my hard work, and also vibe players with passion and desire. (Something like that). That floored me and it was the truth.

Friedman Etude No. 10 by Yili (Video)

Yili is from China and plays in the Ganzouh Symphony. She's a great percussionist and the orchestra sent her here to widen her skills, which is totally cool! She's a great percussionist already and one that is very open minded!

She's studying with Don Liuzzi (timp), Marc Dicciani and myself and has been here for almost 3 months.

Check her out playing the Friedman Dampening and Pedaling Etude No. 10.

The cool thing about this etude is that the pedal is down the whole time.