I teach a lot. Though this summer is a little slower than usual (summers always are) I’ve been trying to come up with new ways of teaching kids how to become musicians, rather than automatons.
Next week, I’m teaching a jazz camp. We’ll be doing John Zorn’s Cobra with early high school and middle school students. Its a bit of a risk and honestly I’m not sure how well it will come off.
If you dont know Cobra, its an improvisatory game that utilizes a system of cards to indicate how the music should unfold. The players give the prompter (me) signals to show various cards, which in turn tells the musicians how to behave. The fun of Cobra is being a part of it, the actual playing of the game. I hope to teach some compositional/improvisatory concepts to the kids in the process.
