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".

Hi all!

I've been working on What A Difference A Day Made for quite a long time already - here is what came out - many flaws of course, but heck it's a practice tape and I am an amateur.

Critics welcome, cheers STE

So, I've been talking about quarter notes a lot this week. As a result, I've been thinking about quarter notes a lot this week. As a result I've been practicing quarter notes a lot this week!

Quarter notes are really interesting to me. They're sort of the essence of the music, the downbeats the strong beats. Some how we have to understand what they are and how to treat them and how to get around them.

Here's the best of my quarter note etudes. The great thing about improvising is that you can make up your own etudes. So that's what I do.

Andrew is a freshman at the University of the Arts. And he's a hard working freshman! He came to the vibe hang today and played minority. Check it out!

This is something completely different.

I imagine some or many of you won't like it, but I want to tell you about it and the process.

I love it, it's a group called Symbiosis and we just get together with our synths and play free electronic music. Don't think atonal or 20th center although there are sections that sound like that. This is music where we listen and try to play tonally in some way.

This is a nice tune to study. I was working on it today and thought I post a version of my practice session. Here it is...

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.

Mike Pinto is a 3 mallet player. He was doing some really cool things today on Blue Bossa with the 3 mallets. A sort of parallel 5th thing that was totally cool.

Check it out here.

I spent a few days with James Whiting, definitely an up and coming vibe player. James is a hard worker and picks up things fast! We had 2 great lessons here in Philadelphia, and he was at the vibe hang today also.

I asked James to play something so I could introduce him on the site.

So check him out!

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.