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To: mcg404 who wrote (19731)	12/5/2003 1:36:17 PM
From: sea_urchin	Respond to of 81234

John > My son hopes to enter a conservatory next year to continue his study of clarinet Excellent, I wish him luck. And you. > Someday i'll get around to uploading to my web site a benny goodman improv piece he performed last year (which he hates...and i love). Maybe you will enjoy it too I began my interest in jazz by listening to Benny Goodman when I was a med student in the early 1950s. Benny was actually a very accomplished musician and a perfectionist who surrounded himself with the top musicians of his day. Some of his pieces are regarded as jazz classics. It was, in fact, because of people like him that the public at large began to take jazz seriously. Before him, and those of his era, people regarded jazz as a very inferior music of sleaze-joints. A lot of the prejudice against jazz had to do with the belief that blacks couldn't produce anything of merit. Of course, in more recent years, everything changed, the music is acclaimed and is regarded as an authentic and worthy art-form in its own right, indeed, I believe the only true American art-form. I still listen to jazz all the time, in fact, I don't know how I would live without it. I haven't played in a band for many years but, no matter, I still like to practice rudiments or play with some recorded music. In the last few years a large amount of self-teaching material has became available for every instrument and, although I had a professional teacher for many years when I stopped "working", I also have a lot of that self-teaching stuff. A thing I like about drums, and which is different from any other instrument, is the necessary independence of action between the limbs which one has to acquire. To be truly proficient, one has to be able to play a different note with each limb and also sing, with all actions co-ordinated. In fact, I know of no better exercise to develop the brain than this kind of drumming because it forces one to use parts of one's brain which are seldom used eg the feet and the left hand. Development of the brain is a very strange thing --- if one does not open up the pathways to the various parts of the brain those parts remain unused. And, if one does not keep using one's brain, it loses functionality.