Wynton’s Guidelines

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No, not that Wynton.

1. Seek out the best private instruction you can afford.

2. Write/work out a regular practice schedule.

3. Set realistic goals.

4. Concentrate when practicing

5. Relax and practice slowly

6. Practice what you can’t play. – (The hard parts.)

7. Always play with maximum expression.

8. Don’t be too hard on yourself.

9. Don’t show off.

10. Think for yourself. – (Don’t rely on methods.)

11. Be optimistic. – “Music washes away the dust of everyday life.”

12. Look for connections between your music and other things.

2016/01/24
Categories: Parallels, Words of Wisdom . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

An Illuminating Parallel

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Extract your own significant quote: http://www.nytimes.com/video/world/100000003970829/in-hong-kong-neons-fading-glow.html

2015/10/14
Categories: Parallels . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

W. o’ W.: Buster Williams

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2015/07/21
Categories: Parallels, Words of Wisdom . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

W. o’ W.: Maria Bustillos

“Reading on-screen tempts us to see things only through the pinhole of our immediate curiosity. I don’t mean to sentimentalize the Reading of Books, but as a practical matter, when you hold a book in your hands, it is very different from what happens when you are typing something onto a glassy, featureless screen. Online, your experience is personalized, but it is also atomized, flattened and miniaturized, robbed of its landscape. Physical books require you to literally hold some of the context of what you are reading, and that is a crucial dimension of understanding.”

2015/07/17
Categories: Parallels, Words of Wisdom . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

William Gedney

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…course, those people who say, ‘But the public is not interested in watching people practice. It wants the finished thing or nothing.’ My answer is that if one does not practice in public in reality, then in nine cases out of ten the world will never see the finished product of one’s work. Some people go on the assumption that if a thing is not a hundred percent perfect it should not be given to the world, but I have seen too many things that were a hundred percent perfect that were spiritually dead, and then things that have life and vitality, which I prefer by far to the other so-called perfect thing.”

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“Still photography and poetry are very close. To capture in a single frame visual forms organized to the point where neither more or less are needed. The single moment when form and content are one. Poetry does the same with words with the same strictness and economy. The exact arrangement of words to produce the effect with no more words than are needed. Art is the seeming perfect blending of many elements to produce a whole.”

 

2015/07/13
Categories: Parallels, Words of Wisdom . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

Q. o’ th’ D.: Marvin Gaye

“I’d been studying the microphone for a dozen years, and I suddenly saw what I’d been doing wrong. I’d been singing too loud. One night I was listening to a record by Lester Young, the horn player, and it came to me. Relax, just relax. It’s all going to be all right.”

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2015/05/12
Categories: Parallels, Tools & Materials . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

Elvin. Jones.

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“First of all you have to listen till you can hear it and then you have to play until you can play it. It‘s as simple as that.”

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“I tried not to make mistakes, and sometimes you make them anyway. It‘s just that one has to be aware, constantly aware, because things don‘t happen by themselves. Your intellect is guiding everything. Your experience with your instrument gives you the wear-with-all, the confidence to know that you can play any pattern that you wish because you‘ve worked on it for 15 or 20 years. You should feel confident in yourself in that way, I know I do. It never bothers me. If you want to play, play! I try to do the best I can.”

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2015/03/11
Categories: Parallels, Words of Wisdom . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

It’s The Big 85 For Ornette!

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Cecil comes to the party and he’s all “Y’know, I’m still a year older than thou.”

Check out how thought-through Ornette Coleman’s music really is:

2015/03/09
Categories: Artist's Statement, Brush with Greatness, Parallels . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

Q. o’ th’ D.: Robert Zimmerman

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“Critics have made a career out of accusing me of having a career of confounding expectations. Really? Because that’s all I do. That’s how I think about it. Confounding expectations.

‘What do you do for a living, man?’

‘Oh, I confound expectations.’

You’re going to get a job, the man says, ‘What do you do?’ ‘Oh, confound expectations.’ And the man says, ‘Well, we already have that spot filled. Call us back. Or don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ Confounding expectations. What does that mean? ‘Why me, Lord? I’d confound them, but I don’t know how to do it.'”

2015/02/08
Categories: Artist's Statement, Parallels, Words of Wisdom . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

Cinephilia

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“Not long ago there were video stores in which you could browse among the shelves, discovering films you had heard of and always meant to try. Most of these stores are history… Supply rewards demand–what else is it to do? When people no longer know what to ask for, some films will go out of stock.

This is not written in anger or indignation. Cinephilia is well catered to now–so long as it is prepared to overlook the memory of movies as a screen-projected film and maybe two thousand people watching. That was the context that made moviegoing not just important but essential. So are movies settling back into the status occupied by novels? That’s possible, and we can be comfortable with it. But consider this possibility: that movies were once based on an inspiring contract, according to which “everyone” could see and be moved by some marvel all at once. That was the nature of a mass medium, and it went beyond entertainment, art, or culture. it was a hope for preserving our perilous existence and sharing experience.” -David Thomson, in The New Republic

2014/11/16
Categories: Media, Parallels, Unplanned Obsolescence . . Author: mrdplus . Comments: Leave a comment

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