Why do we practice?
What do we practice?
Where do we practice?
How do we practice?
Sharing practice, discovery, and experiences. Meeting together in vitality and well-being. Wherever we go, we are in collaboration together. Earth residency.
Addressing ways we can explore and incorporate new resources, ideas, connections with nature, history, wisdom, movement, playful experimentation, events, and the open creative process.
"Technique" is a micro/macro means enabling us to express a language, a musical language of relevance, of meaning, of joining --- a means of meaning, handling, and meeting with context, environment, or even an expectation. Yet, as life changes over time, as it always will, so do our ways of speaking, expressing, and what we speak about. As we continue to learn, our understandings change and grow, and we find meaning in other directions and spaces along the journey. Life also simplifies, or perhaps becomes more complex... but in the end, there's nothing to prove. What it's about is our state of consciousness, our access to perception, to just being and the vaster reality, and how breath and vibration and shape transport us out through our vitality and we find reach of expression. And it's always us. If we think our technique of the moment is somehow "less", it's actually not. The nature and reasons we've arrived where we are now are due to that journey through all of the "technique"/language that served its purpose during a period, and how it reflected a music we were learning and putting into our bodies at that time.
In the end, "technique" is just a trick, a human trick to try and convince us up to a point that we actually need it in order to speak, communicate, or receive communication. And there comes that point where we realize in our practice this freedom to join with reality and nature beyond "technique", beyond any notions of being accepted or even necessarily understood. Other levels of joining and expression can very well not be understood by many, but that also doesn't matter. There are endless languages, and endless things we may not ever understand. And yet, everything is energy. And that we can understand, and feel, and sense in the amounts of things in that joining we are learning. And we want to open up our range of play in perception as humans – how deep our creative experiences can be, meeting with nature, meeting with life, existence – and the greater messages of this consciousness that we have now.
Music is a vehicle. As we learn it, we climb inside and experience its ride and form, and see how and where it takes us, and what kind of vehicle it is. There are so many different kinds of vehicles, how they handle, what kind of terrain they're for. The music represents that, and all of the spirit which fuels it. Then eventually, we learn about where that takes us, the view we have, the landscape, and we come to learn of a further music of a different form of expression and terrain. As we continue to transform, open and surrender, even if now we feel like we are warming up and into expression with less, little, or almost no technique, it's not true. It's all there within us. It is a stretched and suspended flesh that holds it. The meaning we're in now is because of that. It is a deep trust, knowing, and realization. We are on this journey with our self and the conversations we're channeling within this world. No one else can know or understand like we can this path and dream we've been on musically, artistically, perceptually, and all of the music we've experienced and practiced or been influenced and touched by differently and utilized in our life.
The way everyone utilizes music is different -- how we use it and sing it through. In truth, we become timeless in our day's process and opening. And just like when we sit and meditate, we go beyond wavelengths of judgement and category. It's a frequency we transform out of in our letting-go, and we come into touch with our truth and being nature beyond time. We are like upright mirrors, reflecting nature back to nature. And we practice to clean the mirror in order to simply reflect back what is, unfettered. Such is life, and also this personal development work with music. And that's honest practice, and dignified practice, and meditation is with it all the time.
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Private Lessons
For instrumentalists interested in expansive approaches to practice and improvisation
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Your instrument is your meditation, your yoga, your martial art.
Explore new ways of practicing and warming up into life.
Deepen your relationship with music and the natural environment.
Realize your authentic expression.
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Let us reflect on deep artistic life questions and methods of approach to reach perspectives which more deeply ground, resource, and free-up our work. Affirmations for creative action, higher consciousness, (de)constructive physiological clarity, and new inspirations which nurture our continual evolution as expressive human beings.
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I am here to support you to facilitate the most inspired musician you have within you.
I work with musicians to empower their ability to unleash further expressive potential through instrumental practice and/or explorations in improvisation, composition, physical movement, perception, and artistic evolution.
Deepening the relationship with your instrument
We will traverse new, ancient, and unorthodox ways of practicing, holding and understanding instrumental technique and language to refresh, strengthen, and guide you into becoming more intimate and exploratory in day-to-day practice. We will work with new approaches, influences, and possibilities to discover and advance the expressive potential.
Transforming routine practice into raw musical inspiration!
Deconstruct the reasons and components of different expressions to understand their essence and inherent creative possibilities. The aim is to help you connect with your own personal language and true inspiration for each foundational practice. Creative methods of "technical" practice will be developed so that everything becomes more inspiring and alive.
For trombone, and other brass players — stretch the ability!
For brass players in particular, get free from unwanted habits and limitations by working with breath, movement, projection, outdoor practice, as well as the incorporation of new sounds and musics, and learning to playing things originally intended for very different instruments. We will experiment and discover new possibilities and exercises to get stronger, clearer, freer, and with newfound facility and perspective.
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IMPROVISATION
Playing with freedom. A spontaneous inventing through expressive influences and spirit, using all of our musical ingredients and energies we love and are curious about to explore and interact with. We will expand upon these possibilities and put them into practice, getting free from the conventional "shoulds" inherent to stylistic approaches. We unleash the space, the imaginative possibilities, energy, and authentic musical expression. We will explore many different musical parameters such as rhythm, space, distance, melodic meaning, dynamics, and timbre, extending the range of instrumental relationships and ability. Cultivate heightened listening awareness, imagination, and new understandings of energy in music and sound through wide arrays of resources from around the world, other artistic mediums, and body-mind awareness practices.
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𝌀𝌁𝌂𝌃𝌄𝌅𝌁𝌂𝌃𝌄𝌅𝌅𝌄𝌃𝌂𝌁𝌀
As a teacher to children, from toddler to teen, I offer new contact with instruments, creative museum, personal-historical library, musical world culture history, nature sound, energetic well-being, and a love for listening, searching and multi-instrumental discovery. We explore how we're being touched by these experiences and what we can do about it. As we expose ourselves to these things, this "living workshop", students gain regular access to a large and diverse archive of sound recordings, playback methods and resources, and also learn how it feels to have such hands-on access. They discover extraordinary new worlds of musicianship and/or sound awareness. I believe this helps to repair a gap in the educational "system" today and provide new and old reaches of formative listening experiences, with contact to musical materials and history which are nearly on the verge of extinction in schools, let alone homes. I wish for children to be able to see and hear how vastly sound has landed in life over centuries in species, atmospheres, and lands; through instruments, languages, objects, or surfaces, and how we can recreate it today and bring it to life for ourselves. World premieres! It’s a musicological, artisticological, archeological journey, as we are here on earth to collaborate together in some one-of-a-kind somethings of immense potential and take our acknowledgement of it to a different level. Life is a festival.
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Please contact me for any further inquiries.