Wynton At Harvard

Rip

Hey Ben,

thanks for the link, I’ve been following Barry for 3 years now. It’s revolutionized the way I look at music. Its great that you got to do some classes with him.

rip

bbwood_98

Rip,

Man - we got to find a time to hang again!

Barry was a huge influence on me, and even more so on my wife (vocalist Eve Seltzer) - she studied with him for years, (all three classes often - he taught from 6-midnight, piano, vocal, improvisation 2 hours each . . ). Also all of her teachers studied with Barry. Yeah, just super interesting thinker, and educator who's taught so many, many legends.

I hope at some point that many someones will start to re-generate the idea of transmitting to and through the community at a community rate - once a week. I'd love to see that - just going through ideas on tunes, and making it fun, but super challenging - giving rise to great players, and interaction; and at a rate everyone can afford (this was huge for him; in fact whenever I could I payed twice to help subsidize others who might not be able to - Barry NEVER turned students away on money if they wanted to learn).

B

Rip

Hey Ben,

I'd love to hang!

I had not idea that you were so in deep with Barry, that's incredible!

What do you mean about re-generating the idea?

R

bbwood_98

Since Barry passed, to my knowledge there are not any publicly available similar structured classes in the NY area - this seems a shame.

I also think that perhaps peeps could do similar classes in a lot of ways/cities.

So I'm hopeful that someday soon someone will start in on this - and find a way to make it affordable for everyone. There are two fundamental issues that jazz education/music education needs to solve. First - pricing (without devaluing the work of the educators) should not place music training in the rarefied space. Second - remember that improvised music (and Black American Music/American music <and Gypsy jazz!!> in general) is an aural tradition and needs to be taught/communicated that way (IMHO).