Jazz Steps in American Vernacular Dance

There is no one place where you’re going to learn the name and execution of “every” Jazz Step. Pretty soon we can hit a point of arguing over what it means to be defined as a “Jazz Step” in choreography or [primarily solo] dancing.

However, I wanted to write this post to share two videos that were put on youtube a few years ago by a gentleman by the name of Stuart Collins. The first was maybe done as a class review video, but everyone loved the idea of listing Jazz Steps in alphabetical order:

The original video above was so popular, that he soon followed up [via the folks at Philly’s long time Swing venue, LaB] with this second, much more in-depth version. This time, there are other dancers present in order to show you the steps in a way that gives you a ‘3D’ perspective on the information:

If I had more patience I would love to do the above and splice in original vintage film footage, but quite frankly, I’m busy enough with the dance/music-ing to know when to not add a video project to my slate. Perhaps you might like to take on the challenge?

 

…As Featured in the New York Times!

Well, maybe not exactly “Featured” but Rich & Adrian were playing outside of Pete’s Coffee at Fourth Street in Berkeley and apparently the New York Times had a video crew in the area. No name-checking or glorious promotion, but it’s still pretty neat to be a part of Bay Area culture in the NYT…

The full 36-Hours in Berkeley write-up can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/travel/things-to-do-in-36-hours-in-berkeley-calif.html

More Online Musician Tools I Use

(No, I don’t know why I am suddenly posting to the blog but I guess I think it is info worth the sharing/remembering)…

I FORGOT to mention two topics in my post last night: Piano/Keyboards & Ear-Training!
Now, I don’t want to wait for things to download, I don’t want to log in to anything, I just want to use something and be done with it. Now that you know my criteria…

Free Online Keyboards – I’m intentionally not calling these “Pianos” because if you load up a sampled piano sound, it will take much longer to get going and these are just my quick go-to tools. With current HTML5 web technologies, webpages can play a synthesized sound just fine and with vary little load-up time. (Allow me to always recommend using either Google’s Chrome or Mozilla’s FireFox browsers – they self-update so your odds of success are greatly improved.)

Free Online Ear-Training – Look, does anybody outside of school really work on this? I think if you’re feeling like zipping through a few of good old ear training / aural-skills exercises, both of these sites load quickly and offer a pretty good variety of tests:

BONUS – AudioSauna’s Free Online Studio. It doesn’t load quickly but it is a beast of web implementation.