You know that feeling when you’re playing a piece of music and you’re somehow disconnected? What you’re playing is not wrong, but it’s not right either. Something is missing. What? Who? The answer is you! YOU’RE missing. And sometimes, you are literally missing while you’re playing. This is very often manifested by hitting the rim only of the snare drum when you were intending to play a rim/head combo hit on the snare. We hear “click,” not “phwack.” Why do we miss? The simplest explanation is that we’re not looking at what we’re doing. However, it also happens when we’re not looking the music “in the eye”. We are there and we are not there, and that’s not fun, nor does it usually sound very good. Teaching my students this past week, I decided to have them all improvise atop the mambo accompaniment provided by the iOS app ERSKN Afro-Cuban […]

April 2023 Issue