I’ve contemplated starting a book club for quite some time, but I never had a book scream to be shared with others chapter-by-chapter right from the beginning until now. By the end of the introduction to W.A. Mathieu’s Bridge of Waves: What Music Is and How Listening to It Changes the World, I knew I […] Read more…
I recently came across a great TED talk by Charles Limb, M.D., a surgeon who has conducted some fascinating studies to find out what happens in the brain when we play music that is spontaneously generated (i.e. improvised) compared to when we play music that is over-learned (i.e., memorized). The studies include jazz pianists improvising […] Read more…
Reading Simba Tango’s blog post on cadencia prompted me to start collecting quotes from various sources that describe this elusive yet essential phenomenon. Although cadencia is a Spanish word drawn from Argentine tango culture, I believe it can be applied to all dances. I first heard the term cadencia in my 2008 interview with Alex Krebs. Here is how he described it: Part […] Read more…
Whenever I get captivated by a song – which is often – I can’t help but play it over and over again. It’s like a compulsion; there is so much life, so much creative and emotional content flowing through its sound, that I can’t contemplate it all in one listen. I have to internalize it […] Read more…
Sometimes I just love participating in dance discussions and debates. I enjoy having conversations in person, batting ideas back and forth by email, diving into discussions on the forums. But I can only take so much. I’m definitely not a die-hard regular on the forums with thousands of posts. Not that there’s anything wrong with […] Read more…