BYJO plays the music of Chick Corea   A DownBeat Hall of Famer and NEA Jazz Master, 27-time Grammy winner, and keyboard virtuoso, Chick Corea has attained living legend status after five decades of unparalleled creativity and an artistic output that is simply staggering.   Chick is one of the most-nominated artist in the history of the Grammys, with 71 nominations. He's also earned 3 Latin Grammy Awards, the most of any artist in the Best Instrumental Album category.   From straight ahead to avant-garde, bebop to fusion, children's songs to chamber music, along with some far-re ..read more

Hi!  Here you can find the charts that will be played at the Big Band and Vocal Jazz Reading sessions.  Enjoy and come to booth #411 to say Hi! Click on the cover and scroll down to see the score. If you click on the title you will be taken to the description and audio of the chart. BIG BAND Groovin' On Dr. John - Erwin Schmidt Arr. Peter Herbolzheimer - Medium Advanced One by One - Wayne Shorter Arr. David Caffey - Medium Advanced   VOCAL JAZZ  The Preacher - Horace Silver Arr. Kirby Shaw;- Medium Easy I Should Care - Alex Stordahl, Paul Weston, Sammy Cahn Arr ..read more

BYJO plays the music of Louie Bellson   Louie Bellson was deemed “the world’s greatest musician” by Duke Ellington, “the epitome of musical talent and a very gifted composer and arranger” by Oscar Peterson, and “the best person I ever met” by Tony Bennett.   He performed on more than 200 albums with a range of artists, including Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Woody Herman, Dizzy Gillespie, Louie Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Bennett, Mel Torme, Joe Williams, Wayne ..read more

         Dr. Steve Shanley and Alan Feirer talk with composer and jazz educator Bob Washut about the state of jazz education.   Bob Washut is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Northern Iowa where he served as Director of Jazz Studies from 1980-2002, until he retired in 2018. An accomplished jazz composer and arranger, Washut has received numerous commissions from collegiate and high school jazz ensembles, professional jazz artists, and symphony orchestras. Click here to listen to the full podcast: https ..read more

Hi!  Here you can find the charts that will be played at the Big Band and Vocal Jazz Reading sessions.  Enjoy and come to booth #418 to say Hi! Click on the cover and scroll down to see the score. If you click on the title you will be taken to the description and audio of the chart. BIG BAND Fast Lane - Marienthal & Whitty Arr. Eric Richards - Medium Advanced Sweet Lorraine - Cliff Burwell Arr. Peter Herbolzheimer - Medium   VOCAL JAZZ  Belfast Street - Randy Crenshaw - Medium Strollin' - Horace Silver Arr. Randy Crenshaw - Medium  How Do You Kee ..read more

Hi!  Here you can find the charts that will be played at the Big Band and Vocal Jazz Reading sessions.  Enjoy and come to booth #217 to say Hi! Click on the cover and click on 'continue to website'. If you click on the title you will be taken to the description of the chart. BIG BAND Tweeter - Steve Allee - Easy Thinking Of Count - Steve Allee - Medium Easy River Road - Bob Washut - Medium Sneak Out - David von Kampen - Medium Fire In the Furnace - Jeff Jarvis - Medium Advanced Alma Vacía- Miguel Blanco - Advanced The Mayans Were Wrong - Steve Owen - Advanced   VOCA ..read more

Talent vs Hard Work by Greg Goebel Have you ever witnessed an extraordinary performance? Maybe it was Michael Jordan’s “last shot” in game 6 of the 1998 NBA finals. Perhaps it’s listening to Glenn Gould play the Goldberg Variations. Or maybe it’s watching Elon Musk’s revolutionary ideas become reality (regardless of what you may think of him as a person.) For most, a natural reaction is feeling that in some deep way, those performers are different from us. We cannot relate our own performances to theirs and there seems to be an insurmountable chasm from here to there with no conceivable bridge ..read more

Melody: The Lost Art? Robert Washut   Note: This article is a slightly altered version of the original, which first appeared in the IAJE Jazz Research Proceedings sometime in the 1990s. The evolution of the art of jazz improvisation has undergone a curious metamorphosis, closely mirroring developments in classical music. As the Western art music tradition evolved from pure melody (Gregorian chant) to dodecaphony (12-tone music) and beyond, jazz improvisation has witnessed developments ranging from simple ornamentation (New Orleans tradition) to complex abstraction (“sheets of sound,” etc ..read more

Principles for Learning Jazz by Jeremy Siskind Below, you’ll find some of the best advice I’ve heard about learning jazz. Please take the time to consider each of these principles and review them every so often throughout the learning process. 1)    Learn Rules and then Break Them I know, I know, jazz is = supposed to be something you “feel.” Thelonious Monk breaks all the rules, so why shouldn’t you?  The answer to that question is that without structure, you’re not going to learn much. There will be plenty of time to break rules down the road, but you have to really ..read more

Note: This article first appeared in a slightly altered form in the Jazz Educators Journal in October 1994. There exists in music an obvious parallel to both linguistic and literary modes of expression. Consider how the elements of linguistics are mirrored, however vaguely, by the “building blocks“ of music: syntax by phrase and rhythmic structure, semantics by the context of harmony and meter, word forms by motivic permutations, and phonology by timbre. Similarly, the processes of literary and musical composition bear a resemblance: writing a verse of poetry is not wholly unlike assembling a ..read more