Cedar Walton Trio

-Cedar Walton on Piano, Lewish Nash on Drums, David Williams on Bass, Steve Turre on trombone and Vincent Herring on Alto Sax
-at Yoshi's with Ravi
-great hard bop, played mostly his own compositions
-his soloing is better than anything I've heard on his recordings with Art Blakey, each note appropriate, nothing unnecessary, totally unsentimental even while he was 'bopping', not once did he lose his cool, completely in control of himself and the instrument the whole time; and each of his compositions hooked (interview with Cedar Walton here)
-All amazing musicians: Steve Turre-one of the most exciting trombone players I've ever seen, more so than Delfaeyo Marsalis;Vincent Herring burned; Lewis Nash blew me away; David Williams would dance around and shake during the performances, one of the best bass soloists I've seen; just a solid ensemble in general
-'Cedar's Blues' had a 16 bar head but I was confused by the 12-bar choruses, found a transcription online to confirm what I had heard: Cedar's Blues
-would love to see him again, can't believe that he is 71,

The Nuclear Energy of Music

"....the nuclear energy of music: extrinsic metaphors where the metaphorical links are emotions. As nuclear energy can be used constructively or destructively, so can these emotional links. They are dangerous, a fact understood quite clearly by Plato in The Republic. They are dangerous, precisely because they can and have been used to manipulate and destroy. The field is wide enough here to fill a myriad of volumes uniting music, metaphysics, ethics, physiology, psychology and neurology, with about two dozen other areas of knowledge. All of these volumes will deal with the simple fact that music is not just structured sound, but a synaesthesic phenomenon that acts on human nervous systems directly through all senses in addition to having its cognitive appeal to the analytical musical mind...."

Melodic Construction during Improvisation

Another very cool article on the idea of forming a contour of the idea in your mind's ear without necessarily having to hear every note of it; also makes reference to the difference between vertical and horizontal considerations when constructing a line. Joe Gilman was trying to explain the same thing to me but without any mention of vertical vs. horizontal hearing.

A whole wealth of jazz improv info here, same website:
The Jazz Improvisation Almanac

Another one here:
The Jazz Improvisation Primer

The internet is an amazing thing.

Music is a 2-dimensional Language of Forms

I've been asking these questions of all my teachers and musically inclined friends, "what exactly is it that you are 'hearing' ?" I can't take that word for granted anymore, I need to know what it is that people really mean when they say it. For the longest time, I've been totally confused about it, getting different tips and ideas and advice on the topic: from the jist of it it seems that some advocate interval ear training and others advocate 'relation to the tonic' ear training. Recently I decided that since advocates of one method really didn't know how to address the other method (to me at least), I will have to divide my ear training time between both horizontal and vertical ear training, respectively. For now its just a matter of expanding my awareness but as it gets more comfortable, I'll have to start stepping up the intensity of practice. This article confirms it.

Music as a Language:
http://graham.main.nc.us/~bhammel/MUSIC/muslang.html

"....Events and activities - time slicing gives a sequence of complex events which might miss important cross relations. It is better to hear what is being expressed, i.e., all that is going on both vertically and horizontally. To "hear" music is not something that is innate, and not something that requires no effort. Nor can it be done without learning and practice, yet that *is* what is required. To hear and understand music as it expresses itself, is at least as difficult as for one whose mother tongue is English to learn to hear, read and understand Tamil. Speaking it, is another matter...."

"Music can also be analyzed as architecture where the parts have function and form only with regard to the whole. An architecture of integrity is of a whole when it proceedes from unifying principles, one of which is the collection of its substantive materials. The materials are seen to generate the whole: the form of a chaconne has as unifying principles, its customary 3/4 signature, a tonality, and a recurring harmonic sequence upon which a sequence of variations is constructed constituting the chaconne."

Aural Comprehension Guide

More EarTraining Help:

http://www.wmich.edu/mus-theo/etg/et_guide.html

Pubmed Article/ Helene Grimaud

Pubmed article:

Mapping perception to action in piano practice: a longitudinal DC-EEG study

".....The mastering of a musical instrument requires some of the most sophisticated skills, including fast auditory as well as motor processing. The performance targets of the highly trained movement patterns are successions of acoustic events. Therefore, any self-monitoring during musical performance has to rely on quick feedforward or feedback models that link the audible targets to the respective motor programs. Years of practice may establish a neuronal correlate of this connection, which has recently been shown by brain imaging studies for both directions, auditory-to-motor, and motor-to-auditory.

• For auditory-to-motor processing: Professional musicians often report that pure listening to a well-trained piece of music can involuntarily trigger the respective finger movements. With a magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiment, Haueisen & Knösche [1] could demonstrate that pianists, when listening to well-trained piano music, exhibit involuntary motor activity involving the contralateral primary motor cortex (M1).

• For motor-to-auditory processing as a possible feedforward projection, Scheler et al. [2] collected functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) brain scans of eight violinists with German orchestras and eight amateurs as they silently tapped out the first 16 bars of Mozart's violin concerto in G major. The expert performers had significant activity in primary auditory regions, which was missing in the amateurs....."

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-read article in NYTimes about Helene Grimaud, a beautiful French classical concert pianist who divides her time between music studies and wolf conservation; mentioned that she spends most of her earnings on her wolf conservation efforts and therefore does not own a giant grand piano in her living room-revealed that she has no serious need for one as she does most of her practicing in her head, a technique which results in more spontaneity in her playing and also reduces the likelihood of phsyical injury.

SongTrellis

Interesting website: http://songtrellis.com/
Has over 1200 chord charts (though w/out melody, probably for copyright reasons) and some articles regarding music education, composition, improvising etc. The webmaster, Bernard Chinn, looks like he's put some serious work into developing this resource. Found it while I was looking for the changes to 'Ill wind' as heard on Lee Morgan's 'Cornbread'.