Tell us, what is the best advice that you have ever received that has shaped your music making? When I was first becoming interested in jazz , I was in the the last year of secondary school (in England this is often called 6th form). I had gone to a local polytechnic college as it had a decent music course. My composition teacher was a really eccentric trumpet player and electroacoustic contemporary classical composer. Great guy who also had studied jazz in the past. I asked him what the chords at the end of “There Will Never Be Another You” were all about. He said “that’s the question you will probably be asking yourself on and off for the rest of your life and you might never really have a definite answer, but that’s the job of a jazz musician” Whilst it didn’t answer the question as I had wanted, it helped me realise that jazz is for lifelong study, harmony is often subjective and that really there aren’t any right answers with any of this stuff. (I’d say though that the actual answer is just, a prolonged cadence from chord I back to chord I again, often done via a few chromatic dominant chords but that’s not really essential) What’s yours?

So… I did my own purpose-serving version of the challenge. I transposed to the key of C and Am and modified it to fit over “In other words” because I’m trying to add that tune to my repertoire. And so here it is my very disrespectful take on the lick of the week.

Here’s a short excerpt from my first concert with an amateur group. I’d like to thank Matt for all the work we’ve done together over the past months. His lessons and guidance have helped me grow as a musician and gave me the confidence to take this step. I’m happy to share this moment with the community. Much of what you hear in this performance reflects what I’ve learned during these months of study. Thank you, Matt, and thanks everyone for the support! 🎻🎶

Tell me the first hurdle you came up against when starting to play jazz. I think my first hurdle was actually due to self belief. I heard Grappelli and thought “there is no way I could play that”. I loved the music but didn’t understand it and couldn’t work out how he was improvising it all. Tell me in the poll if you think your first hurdle was belief, technique, theory, rhythm, something else or and even better, elaborate in the comments.

Hy community today I started to practice the lessons on chromatisms. I exercised over Dm for a while and then went over to “Beautiful love” and just tried to use both the tetrads and the chromatic steps from that first exercise. Criticism is welcome, you can be as crude as you want, my ego can’t be shattered any further