As it turns out, I will be teaching aural skills at NYU this semester

A couple of weeks ago I posted about how a couple of NYU’s new progressive music theory and aural skills classes have been assigning this blog. Either coincidentally or as a result of the post, the department offered me a section of  Aural Skills II – Popular Music. That feels good, and it’s an opportunity to put a lot of long-held ideas I’ve had about how to teach this material into practice. It’s not a lot of prep time, and I have some nerves about that, but they have offered me plenty of materials to draw on. I’ll be posting updates about it here.

Whisper Not

When I was in college, I picked up a cassette of Legacy by Jon Faddis from the dollar bin at the record store. It’s a kind of greatest hits of jazz trumpet, and it was one of the best dollars I ever spent. The last three tunes were especially wonderful: “A Child Is Born” by Thad Jones, “Lil’ Darlin’” by Neal Hefti, and “Whisper Not” by Benny Golson. I have to give it up to the producer for that sequencing; the obvious move would have been to end the album on “Lil’ Darlin'”, but instead, just when you’ve been lulled into a peaceful slumber, “Whisper Not” opens up a whole new and unexpected atmosphere of nocturnal mystery. I rewound this part of the tape endlessly.

Here’s a live performance of Benny Golson playing “Whisper Not” with the Jazz Messengers in France in 1958, along with Art Blakey on drums, Lee Morgan on trumpet,  Bobby Timmons on piano and Jymie Merritt on bass.

Golson gives some insight into his compositional process in this Jazzwax interview with Marc Meyers. Continue reading

Things I wrote in 2023

This year I wrote a bunch of groove pedagogy, including a book proposal and related materials aimed at future publications and teaching. So far, the only published part of all that work is 5 Pop Grooves for Orff Ensembles, a collection of educational music that I composed with Heather Fortune. But lots more is coming, hopefully this year. More on that below.

The two most significant things that I actually completed this year were the syllabi for two New School classes, The Song Factory and Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling. Many of this year’s blog posts were motivated directly or indirectly by those classes.

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NYU Steinhardt is assigning this blog in its music theory and aural skills core classes

Last night I went to a holiday party for NYU Steinhardt’s music education program, where I got my PhD and where I have been teaching the Technology and Pop Practicum courses for several years now. Steinhardt has been overhauling its core music theory and aural skills curricula, and while I am highly interested in this process, I have not been involved in it. I have a lot of opinions about this, but not much credentialing in music theory pedagogy. At the party, a student told me that her theory and aural skills teachers are assigning her a lot of material from this blog. This was news to me. I’m flattered, of course, but also sad, because no one has talked to me about it, much less invited me to teach any of the classes. Like I said, I know my formal CV doesn’t really support that, but if the blog is good enough to assign…

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How Infrastructure Works

Deb Chachra, one of the smartest people I have ever had the pleasure to meet, has a new book out. You should read it!

It’s not directly related to the subject of this blog but, hey, it’s my blog, I can write about whatever I want. Besides, it’s Thanksgiving, and what better thing to be thankful for than functioning water, power, sewage, roads, transit and communication systems? (To the extent that those things function in the US – looking at you, public transit systems.) An alternate title for the book could be “What Infrastructure Means”. Another could be “move slow and fix things.” You can get a taste of it in this Guardian article that Deb wrote about Electric Mountain.

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Nature Boy Megamegamix update

A while back, I made a mashup of many different versions of “Nature Boy”, one of the loveliest and weirdest jazz standards. Every so often I go back and add new versions to it. Here’s the latest update.

I added Jon Hassell’s recording of the tune over the beat from “B Boys Will B Boys” by Mos Def and Talib Kweli, and did some other general tightening up. Enjoy!

Can I Kick It?

In order to shop at the Park Slope Food Coop, you have to do a monthly work shift. I do two a month, one for me and one for my wife, who is much too busy earning most of our money to do her own shifts. I work early mornings on the Receiving squad. As produce gets unloaded from trucks outside, we break down the pallets, bring everything into the basement, and organize it into the various walk-in coolers. One of the Receiving coordinators plays music from a mammoth Spotify playlist called Sea of Liquid Love, over 1,900 tracks spanning hip-hop, electronic dance music, reggae and other groove-oriented styles from around the world. During my last shift, “Can I Kick It?” came up in the rotation, and in spite of the fact that we were schlepping boxes of vegetables around before dawn, everybody lit up. Why is that track so great? How did these guys, all of whom were younger than twenty years old, record such an all-time banger?

Before I try to answer the bigger questions, let’s take a look at the samples in the order of their appearance in the track.

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Exploring Hip-Hop Pedagogies in Music Education

Over the weekend I went to a hip-hop education panel organized and moderated by my fellow white hip-hop advocate Jamie Ehrenfeld, featuring four of the brightest lights in the field: Jamel Mims aka MC Tingbudong (rapper in English and Mandarin), Dizzy Senze (devastatingly great freestyle rapper), Regan Sommer McCoy (curator of the Mixtape Museum), and Marlon Richardson, aka UnLearn the World (another devastatingly great freestyle rapper). Several other emcees showed up, including one of my main hip-hop peer educators, Roman The Mafioso, pictured below.

After the panel, all the emcees got into a cypher. At first they were rapping over a DJ, while a few NYU kids tried to play along on saxophones and piano. Then the DJ paused and folks tried rapping over just the NYU music students’ instrumental accompaniment. Roman gently trolled the NYU kids: “Keep it steady, keep it steady.” They did better when Steff Reed jumped on the piano and replaced their uncertain jazz with thumping gospel. Listening to this, I felt what I always feel in a cypher: that freestyle rap is the most advanced and sophisticated form of music I have ever heard in my life.

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Dissertation summary

I applied for something that asked for a ten page summary of my doctoral dissertation. Maybe you would like to read it, rather than the full 300 pages?

Learning Something Deep: Teaching to Learn and Learning to Teach Hip-Hop in New York City (summary)

Image: Toni Blackman leads a middle school songwriting workshop

In this dissertation, I present a narrative of learning to teach hip-hop, and of teaching to learn hip-hop. I document my process of learning hip-hop music education methods from practitioners, and of teaching music education students with those methods. The narrative begins with my inquiry into how hip-hop might best be included in school music programs, or more specifically, into the preparation of pre-service music teachers. I profile three hip-hop educators: teachers and teaching artists whose practice uses hip-hop music, aesthetics, and values to advance social justice goals. I then discuss putting these educators’ approaches into practice in a music education course that I taught at New York University. I examine the experiences and perspectives of students in this course in order to assess its effectiveness. Finally, I use all of the above to inform my proposed suggestions for the roles that hip-hop might play in university-level music education programs generally.

Throughout the study, I ask the following questions: What is hip-hop music education? What are its goals? What are its methods? How do we practice it ethically? In order to answer these questions, along with additional related and emergent questions, I situate the study in the larger context of popular music pedagogy in high schools, in teaching artist practices in school and community settings, and in the university programs that prepare teachers to do this work. I explore the role that hip-hop methods can play in the preparation of pre-service music educators. In particular, I examine the ways that hip-hop music education can support critical praxis and challenge the white racial frame of American music education.

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