Join jazz vocalist & Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Jazz Studies at the City College of New York, Suzanne Pittson, for this webinar. In addition to being a great trumpeter, Chet Baker was also one of the finest scat singers in the history of jazz, and, like Louis Armstrong, his scat solos contain the […]
Dealing With Weird Instrumentation and Improving Improvisation…It’s Real Easy! by Steve Wiest When I have the honor of taking part in a middle school, high school or university jazz festival as an adjudicator, I am presented with an all-too-common list of perplexing situations: Big Bands with bizarre instrumentation (REALLY bizarre!) Virtuoso charts that are WAY […]
Drafting a Roadmap to Effective Vocal Improvisation By Justin Binek In a previous article for the JEN e-newsletter (published in February 2017), I briefly discussed improvisational teaching strategies that I have used with singers at the collegiate level, focusing on some tools that I use to help students lock down the form of the tune […]