Dr. Aaron Lington

I hope this letter finds you all well and having a successful and musically fulfilling semester. It was great to see so many of you at the Winter Conference this year! The Conference is a fantastic opportunity not only to hone and expand your skills as musicians and music educators; it is also an opportunity to network with colleagues and strengthen the bonds you have with your fellow teachers.

I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the clinicians who presented jazz clinics at this year’s conference: Paul Tynan, St. Francis Xavier University; Bob Athayde, Stanley Middle School; and Steve Tyler, DeAnza College. It is through the dedication and expertise of these fine clinicians that our conference is and continues to be one of the highlights of my year. Thank you, gentlemen!

At the writing of this letter, we have concluded all of the jazz festivals for this year. Another round of thanks is due to the site hosts for running all of the jazz festivals this year: Steve Hendee, Julie Bounds, Kevin Klemenok, and Larry Colon. I would also like to thank Gus Kambeitz for the use of the facilities at West Valley College in Saratoga for the Jazz South festival. These educators help make the CMEA Bay Section festivals successful and educational for all those involved. I have heard positive feedback from many of the judges about the level of the groups this year and I would like to congratulate all of the dedicated jazz directors in Bay Section. Keep up the good work!

While judging sight-reading at De La Salle High School for Jazz East/Valley, I was pleasantly surprised at the overall high level of sight-reading ability demonstrated by the groups who elected to attempt the sight-reading portion of the festival. After listening to many of the groups sight-read, I asked the students the following question, “Why is sight-reading important?” I received a number of answers ranging from the importance of this skill as a professional jazz musician to the fact that it is important at CMEA jazz festivals (I though this last response was very insightful!). I responded to the students’ answers with my own: sight-reading is important because it allows us to get past the technical aspects of the music quickly and allows us to make music sooner. It is for this reason that I encourage you to have your jazz ensembles sight-read as often as possible, not just in preparation for competition in jazz festivals. Additionally, have your students sight-read during their individual practice time to build confidence that will bolster their skills as sight-readers within an ensemble. The best way to have students develop individual sight-reading skills is by having them read through etude books they have never practiced out of before – have them set a metronome a bit slower than the marked tempo and read through the entire etude without stopping. They should not stop to correct mistakes, and they should not go back to address mistakes after making it to the end of the etude. Have your students read the etude in its entirety and then turn the page to the next etude. It is in this way students will develop confidence in sight-reading and will learn to recognize patterns at sight and immediately realize the patterns on their instrument. A great series of etude books with which your students can practice individual sight-reading is the Jazz Conception series by New York alto saxophonist Jim Snidero. This series is published by Advance Music.

I would like to wish you all a wonderful semester and please drop me a line sometime!

Aaron Lington Modal Jazz Handout from the 2008 Winter Conference

Paul Tynan 2008 Winter Conference Handout-Jazz

I sincerely hope everyone is doing well and that your goals for the semester becoming a reality. I am excited to announce a fantastic lineup of jazz-related clinics that will be presented at the Winter Conference this January.

A jazz reading session featuring the 8 O’clock Daddios band from DeAnza College, directed by Steve Tyler, is the one of the highlights of this year’s jazz clinics at the Conference. This professional-level ensemble will be reading new publications for middle school and high school jazz ensembles graciously provided by Pepper Music of San Francisco. This is an excellent way to hear top-notch performances of some new charts you may be interested in performing with your own ensembles.

Paul Tynan, Associate Professor of Jazz Trumpet at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, will be presenting a clinic on developing a jazz eighth-note time concept. This clinic will be helpful for all jazz improvisers and will give educators an excellent model by which they can help their students improve this facet of their playing. Feel free to bring your instrument – there will be a live rhythm section and you will be able to try out some of Prof. Tynan’s suggestions! You can learn more about Paul Tynan at:
http://people.stfx.ca/ptynan.

Bob Athayde, band director at Stanley Middle School in Lafayette, CA, and the director of the Lafayette Summer Music Workshop will be presenting a clinic on rehearsal techniques, pedagogy, and resources for young jazz ensembles. This clinic is a must for every director seeking to improve his/her middle school or early high school jazz ensemble sound, time feel, concept, and overall effectiveness. You can find out more about Bob Athayde at http://stanleymusic.org/people/faculty/bob-athayde.

I will be presenting a clinic on the applications of modal improvisation. Modal improvisation, or improvisation based on only a few scales, is a great way to introduce young jazz musicians to the art of improvisation. Many young improvisers can be intimidated by non-stop series of chord changes, and modal improvisation offers an alternative that allows young players to focus on accurate note choices in a melodic framework.

In closing, I would like to encourage you all to consider taking some of your students to live jazz concerts for a music-related field trip. The Bay Area is loaded with world-class jazz clubs, such as Yoshi’s in Oakland and Kuumbwa in Santa Cruz. These clubs book some of the best international, national, and regional talent and can provide a great boost in excitement for your jazz students.
Take care and drop me a line sometime! Best wishes for continued success this semester!

Greetings from San José State University! Allow me to welcome in another school year — a year that I hope will be filled with success and progress for you and your music program.

In the many festivals I have judged in the Bay Area and in Northern California, I have heard a number of excellent jazz ensembles — ensembles with a great sense of swing, time feel, matching articulations and dynamics, pitch accuracy, and all of the things that make a great ensemble sound like a coherent unit. The one thing that is consistently at a lower lever than other facets of the music is the students’ improvisational ability. I encourage you to take the opportunity this year to encourage your students to improve their improvisation.
There are a number of ways to approach teaching improvisation to beginners. The most common and effective way is to limit the students to a single scale to be used over the entire course of the improvised solo. The reason this is a good idea is that by limiting the pitch content a student can choose from for his/her solo, the more likely he/she will play notes that are consonant with the underlying harmony — this tends to make the student feel much more confident about what they are playing. Th e most common application of this technique is used on the blues form with the students employing only the blues scale for their improvisation. However, I do not think that the blues form and its appropriate blues scale is the best choice for beginners. The harmonic content of the blues is simple in its basic form, but is still too harmonically sophisticated to play only one scale sound over its entirety and have the student still sound convincing.

A better type of composition to have students focus on in their efforts to improve their improvisations is a modal composition. A modal tune is at its essence only comprised of a few scale sounds and therefore is very appropriate for applying the technique of limiting your students to only one or two scales for their improvisation. A great example of a modal composition is the Miles Davis piece “So What,” which can be found on the album Kind of Blue. “So What” is an AABA composition that uses only one scale sound for the A sections (the D Dorian scale) and one scale sound for the B section (the Eb Dorian scale). These two scales are easily learned by a high school jazz musician and by limiting themselves to pitches only contained within these two scales and subsequently applying them at the appropriate point in the composition, the student will be able to play a solo that is consonant, correct, and convincing.

Of course, this does not account for style within a student’s solo — but that can be drastically improved by listening to a wide variety of albums by the jazz masters. Have a wonderful semester and if you get a chance, drop me a line!