What is this life, its potential and its music?

Why do we improvise and work with sound?

For Musicians

Are you searching for new inspiration and other levels of expressive musical experience?

Do you want to open up new approaches to instrumental practice and improvisation?

Where is today's sound exploration leading?

About my teaching

Connect and consult with me on your practice, your calling, and where it's headed. In many ways, this is the most exciting, grounding and creative thing—what we're discovering, what's influencing us, affirming us forward. It is the essential process of uncovering and expanding one's true nature as a musician, artist, and multi-level creator. Therefore, in my teaching work, I take much time to discuss and focus on exploring the day-to-day expansive practice itself, of course also sharing many of the latest inspirations and methods I am using to assist me. For example, there are seven major components in the practice I teach: intention, physiology, deconstruction, multi-instrumental practice, documentation, listening, and other artistic mediums. Here are short summaries of each component.

• Intention—setting the tone and aligning the energy and spirit.
• Physiology—working with movement, breath, projection, endurance, and space.
• Deconstruction—technical, instrumental, gestural, compositional.
• Multi-instrumental practice—to embody new and freshly integrating perspectives of sound and touch across body and mind.
• Documentation—tools for recording, perspective, reflection, material and footage in experimentation.
• Listening—exploring vast archives of world music, nature sound and field recording, classical and contemporary music and composition, as well as jazz and its relative history.
• Other artistic and psycho-physical mediums to incorporate as sources of musical/expressive inspiration, exercise, meditation practice, focus/work ethic and research.

As we will discuss, reflect and explore such approaches, the main objective is to discover where your inspiration is naturally gravitating and evolving, and how it advances your instrumental and artistic expression. What are you encountering today that lights you up, changes you? How is this evolving your language?

Musical practice is a life of energetic research, exploration, self-influential immersion, and experimentation, where we continually rediscover ourselves as improvisers, collaborators, and artists. Anything can essentially become or affect our music when we are touched by it deeply enough, and we are free to source whatever it is that speaks to us. Improviser = Composer. We are each a "world record," a unique language, piercing through history with our love. We follow what we love, called to evolve and connect upon this great opportunity of communicative existence, and to take part in something greater than ourselves.

"CURRICULUM"◬ POINTS OF DISCUSSION ◬ TOPICS ◬ ESSENTIALS

Here are some examples of various areas of access I would love to touch on with you.

• Tools for the practitioner. Recording, experimentation, documentation, equipment.
• Intention and energy. Daily ritual, and practice trajectory.
• Practice and projective space. Bringing it OUTDOORS. Finding your spot.
• Strengthening and physical introspection. Athletics, methods, practices, meditations, resources, influences.
• Expansion of breath. Practices, relationships, and influences.
• Reflections and activations on technique, warmup, and its meanings. How, what, and why.
• Feeding the body new musical movement. Physical material, digestion, and vehicles of action. Supplying new self-physiology, rehearsal, and orchestration.
• Questions of "style". Habits, awareness, language, cultures, roots, relationships, implications.
• Investigations of melodic meaning. Roots and relationships, sources, examples, feelings, questions.
• Questions of "stylelessness". Simplification, associations, affiliations, space, nature. What, how, and why.
• Questions, reasons and musical revelations on space, silence, pacing, and flow.
• Changes of instrumental tuning, and holding. Technical deconstruction and instrumental disassemblage. Relocations of motion and movement material.
• The importance of multi-instrumental experimentation. Osmosis, influence, and exploration. Examples, strategies, practices.
• Explorations of world music. Regions, reasons, geography, recordings, sources, archives.
• Explorations of nature sound and field recordings. Sources, geography, archives, musical implications, compositional perspectives, experimentations.
• Explorations of classical & contemporary music. Composers, performers, recordings, histories, footage, resources.
• Expanding further notions of abstraction in music and art. Texture, space, and time. Reasons, implications, sources, practices, histories.
• Searching for "secret" or "hidden" music from both musical and non-musical sources. Practicing hearing music in everything. How. Examples. Experiments.
• Audio-visual perception stretching. Experiments, insights, discoveries, methods, tools.
• Considering new "translations"/assimilations. What can become. Music, or sound.
• Reflections and immersions on art and artists. Books, resources.
• Wisdom and wavelengths of the ancients on meditation and consciousness. Source readings.

Inspiration

Source new influential affirmation from the world at large, channeling it in to the ways you work, integrating vast values into the depths of practice, hearkening an awareness and connection essentially stretching back to ancient times. We carry all of this with us in a grounded life, which encodes its way into our authentic expression in sound and creative visions. It is a great freedom, discovering this personal and magical path, finding new links and alchemical bridges between realities—a surrealism, dream, and poetry touching, informing, and affirming these connections being made. Intellect and spirit interfuse, as we expose and subject ourselves to the teachings, works and writings from the great masters and creators—developing our work in consciousness, which then everything becomes. Profound encounters with examples that defy tradition, and yet are because of tradition. We expand and nourish our mind and soul, using these means and living space to discover and reveal that which draws us towards revelation in performance and thriving creative spirit. Our work is our practice. Work and practice are never separate, each enabling the other, a response to the other—so, we create! And one thing forever leads to the next, continually becoming the message and crest of our existence.

For non-musicians

Much of the above will certainly resonate with you if you're here with me now. Much of the above is certainly applicable to you too if you're here with now. For we are all athletes of the heart, and our well-being is nourished by the balance of "what we eat", not just through the mouth, but the ears, the eyes, the mind, our whole body... We fertilize the soil of our soul, planting creative and spiritual seeds, learning about the weather patterns of life, the lay of the land, and how we can cultivate and harvest this thriving relationship with the magic of our path and the greater vitality of our spirit and energy, and how to further open up our expressive potential.

Talk with me, meet with me, consult with me, confide in me. Let me help you to incorporate new sources of inspiration, wisdom, creative perspective, understanding and practice into your life. I can introduce you to methods and records which have been so supportive to me on this path as a collaborative musician, artist and spiritual human being. It's so important and inspiring to find new perspectives and directions of adventurous experiences. Our life is a Living Workshop. Earth Residency. This is what we do. And this is why I'm here. To work with you, connect on this inspiration, share and introduce new possibilities, and explore this deeper inquiry together.