Jason

oh my god its beautiful ….

alternate Eight Evolutions cover

I got the Switch 2 with Mario Kart! 2 thoughts from tonight:

- UI Menu Music is back!! Immediate 3DS nostalgia

- They went hard on the Mario Kart OST, they were clearly like oh so you like Dolphin Shoals do you

🌳 NEW RELEASE:

Past Future Present Memory

an album by
@samplemance.rs

with art by
@aurahack.ca

Coming 6/12

💾 Preorder here:
h-v-b.bandcamp.com/album/past-f...

✨ VINYL PREORDERS OPENING SOON ✨

James Blake - CMYK
Lianne La Havas - Is Your Love Big Enough
KKB - Civilisation
KKB - Time ‘n’ Place
Lindsay Lowend - Wind Fish
NewJeans - How Sweet
KNOWER - Knower Forever
Louis Cole - Quality Over Opinion
Lamp - Yume
Masayasu Tzboguchi Trio - Autumn in Tokyo

YouTube video by CJ The X That Time Disney Ruined Kiki's Delivery Service

fantastic video essay

youtu.be/d5mO-obJdTQ?...

the points made at the very end about creative generosity and not being afraid of being taken advantage of really resonated with me — I feel like I often went against my instinct and turned down work in the past unnecessarily

snickering to myself in the office imagining this

I bet you have more knowledge in your hands than you’re giving yourself credit for 🧐

For what it’s worth I definitely don’t think about that many notes at once - it’s more like “shapes” like “oh this is what a rootless F9 chord feels like in my left hand” so in that way it’s more like keeping track of 2 shapes. But the problem is there are sooo many shapes

a clip from last lesson where I thought I did pretty well

this week’s assignment is the blues. It’s something I think that’s very easy to “get in your ears” but the tempo we were assigned is pretty quick so I think I’m just going to focus on rhythm, getting it really crisp, having variety … worry about the actual notes later.

sertraline, by miles morkri & aivi track by miles morkri & aivi

🎵🌸 NEW RELEASE:

“sertraline”

a single by
@milesmorkri.bsky.social & @aiviwave.com

with art by
@aggelicyiok.bsky.social

Bandcamp: aiviwave.bandcamp.com/track/sertra...

It’s remarkable my teacher hears these differences at all — one thing I need to start doing when listening to jazz is listening to everything other than the piano right hand — what’s the left hand voice leading sound like? How is the rhythm of the left hand interacting with drums? stuff like that

The other side of that compliment though is that my left hand voicings were not great. I’ve already had to get used to playing rootless in a trio setting but the main takeaway this week was that the range at which your left hand should be in generally is fairly narrow — ideally between D3 and D4

“Your right hand played some really nice things”

That’s a W for me! the main thing I practiced last week that really helped was variety — constantly switching up texture ie 8th notes, 16th note runs, chords, starting on different beats of the measure. Definitely felt like my solo had more shape

Been listening to a lot of solos lately and videos on soloing and I think the main takeaway for me is to practice different textures and moving between them, eg:

- scales/runs
- chords
- leaps

all with rhythmic variation

Variety is not the same thing as narrative… but contrast creates a story

Thoughts I am juggling as I work through this “how do I make my solos have more narrative” problem

- Singing lines before I play them
- ending lines on chord tones
- call and response
- practicing chromatic approaches/enclosures

So for this week’s practice, one of the things I will do is practice taking a motif and then just improvising a bunch of lines trying to incorporate that motif. Maybe I’ll post some. My goal is always to show improvement on specific criticisms from previous lessons, shame keeps me motivated :)

In my latest class, my teacher’s main criticisms for me were that I need to actually tell a story with my solo, rather than just play “stuff”

This is something I feel pretty good at when I’m composing, but of course it’s much much harder to do when improvising

…I’ve been playing Melee against CPUs my whole life and now I’m finally playing with other people. The good part of that is all my technical facilities are there, but my brain is SO far behind. It’s been exhilarating watching it start to catch up…

Anyway I had online lessons for a few years which taught me the fundamentals, but in January I started actually playing in a piano trio on a weekly basis as part of a class

It’s been life changing — not to knock classical music (which I still love) but esp as a pianist it feels like

Been off social media for the last year and still idk my relationship to it. Gonna try something which is to document my music learning process here

I’m your typical classically-trained-pianist-wants-to-learn-jazz guy, since I’ve become this guy I’ve met like 5 others, common thing I guess

As always every year, I get so inspired by all the amazing independent art that we get to showcase at the Snowdrop Festival. I didn’t write very much music this year but was glad to have been able to contribute something. What a fantastic community