By day, pianist, composer and conductor Jon Parker (BA ’08) is a master’s degree student in musicology and a graduate teaching assistant at DU.

By night, the award-winning musician is a jazz bandleader and piano player at the Hillstone Restaurant in Cherry Creek.

Read the full article HERE.

I have several outdated tracks up on the site, which will soon be replaced with new recordings. If MySpace is still out there for 25 million users a month, then I should be too.

HypeBot Link: MySpace is adding new users

This information leads me to believe that musicians should be capitalizing on Social Media. You may say, “Yeah Duh” but you would be surprised how many musicians don’t have websites, and forget to utilize Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets to push their careers.

The linked site contains a cool infographic with details about job types, locations, and salaries.

Link: How Much are Your Social Media Skills Worth?

A big part of my interest has been the war between organic music, and the heavily mixed computer music. I was shocked when Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters gave his acceptance speech. After sharing that they had made their recording in his garage straight to tape, he said,

“To me this award means a lot because it shows that the human element of music is what’s most important… Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that’s the most important thing for people to do.”

Wow. The audience reaction was stellar. Everything from a mix of ecstatic applause, to stoic responses.

So, what is better? Does music have to be acoustic to be good or does computer based music have its place?

I tend to agree with both camps. There is a lot of “art” involved in music making whether it’s coming from a guitar and voice straight to the final products, or whether layers upon layers of tracks are mixed and every nuance of vocal performance is edited to give it the “perfect” sound.

JP

1- Some musicians pursue their dream by playing, playing playing. They choose not to go to school to study music, but instead learn everything they know from the bandstand and their own practice. Often these people become great players and play tons of gigs. I’ve known quite a few Jazz and pop musicians that go about their careers this way. Classical musicians, on the other hand, rarely pursue a career in music through this method, as it seems more common to study under the tutelage of a well established orchestra player in a conservatory or university.

2- The second option is to go to school, take lessons at your conservatory/university, play in the school’s ensembles, practice as often as you can (in between writing papers and reading countless pages of what may seem meaningless at the time) and then try to find gigs outside of school. This method can produce great players as well.

I was sort of a hybrid of these methods; going straight to music school after high school but then leaving after my first year to pursue my performing career. After 7 years of playing for a living, I went back to school to finish my undergrad in music and am still in school working on my Masters. I cannot stress enough the life experience that playing for a living taught me. For a time, I was able to practice 8+ hours a day, gig 5-7 nights a week and not have a care in the world outside of my music.

When I returned to school, I had a completely different perspective on music school. At first I thought I would hit the practice room as hard as I could. In reality, I realized that time constraints from academic classes, family, and life prevented me from doing this. Then I had a revelation- I actually enjoyed the coursework. Music History, Music Theory, English, Math Science and History were fascinating to me. Learning about the world influenced my playing in much better ways than a daily ritual of scales, exercises and sight reading.

However, this would not have been possible without the time I spent before I went back to school playing as much as I could. I could already sight read and play scales. I think the struggle began, or maybe the fun began, with striking a balance between performance and learning. Really, it was all tied together. Learning about madrigals made me think differently about the way I approached arranging; Baroque improvisation shed new light on Jazz improvisation and 20th Century French organ music deepened my understanding of harmony.

Jon will be playing Chick Corea’s “Armando’s Rhumba” in a feature performance with the Lamont Jazz Orchestra, directed by Lynn Baker, Director of the Lamont School of Music Jazz and Commercial Music Program. This feature performance is one of 3 performances Jon will give as the winner of the 2011-2012 Lamont Jazz Solo Honors Competition. Admission is free and open to the public.

Visit http://uwf.edu/music/phillipsjazz/ for more information on the competition.