Jazz Smugglers Master Workshop

Jazz Smugglers Master Workshop
Click on photo for Jazz Smugglers website

Friday, 21 June 2013

UNDOUBTEDLY THE FINEST FREE ONLINE JAZZ COURSE EVER.. From BERKLEE

Our Jazz Smugglers friend, Steve Evitts signed up for this free online jazz course devised by Gary Burton for Berklee Uni. This is his report on it. This introductory video has had 5,500 hits on YouTube. Thousands have signed up for it in the past few months.


I’ve finished the Gary Burton improvisation course, now. Very demanding but definitely worth doing. I learned a lot – although it’s probably going to take years for me to incorporate all the ideas into my playing.

You and your smugglers may be interested to know that the next 5 week session of the course is due to start on July 19th (according to the course wrap-up email I got) 

It’s free and anyone can sign up for it. You need to be able to spend at least 8 hrs a week on it, not all in one go, I would say more is better. 

The course is made up of short video lectures, and course work. The course work consists of some written stuff (analysing music, scales etc.) and a weekly improvisation assignment, which you need to be able to record and upload to the internet – they provide a backing track for you to download and play along to. (it doesn't need to be fantastic quality, just good enough for someone to tell if you are playing what has been asked for.  You also need to be able to read music a bit. My sight reading is terrible and I managed ok. 

Your course work is assessed each week by five of your peers -  and part of the course requirement is that you also must assess five of your peers. The range of abilities of people doing the course I did seems to range from novices to virtuosos. I found that of the people I assessed each week typically one was better than me and the others weren’t, to give you some idea.

If anyone is interested they need to sign up for the course here.
and click on the Future Sessions “Add to Watchlist” button.

John


The Jazz Smugglers band

The Jazz Smugglers workshop

In this blog We will produce tips for jazz piano, and jazz guitar together with jazz saxophone. We will cover jazz chords, jazz guitar chords, and we will deal with jazz scales. We will cover jazz songs. This site is all about jazz improvisation.
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