I approach jazz workshops as spaces for inquiry—not instruction alone.
Whether working with students, educators, or professional musicians, my aim is to slow the conversation down: away from formulas and toward listening, decision-making, and shared awareness. Jazz, as I understand it, is not a style to be mastered but a practice of attention—to sound, to time, to one another, and to the history that informs the present moment.
Across these workshops, I return to a set of core concerns: how musicians learn to hear form as it unfolds, how structure can emerge through constraint, and how improvisation becomes meaningful when it is grounded in intention rather than information. The focus is not on accumulation, but on orientation.
I regularly present these sessions at jazz and music education conferences, universities, and festivals. Each workshop balances conceptual clarity with practical application, always rooted in real musical situations rather than abstract models.
The topics outlined below are not a sequence or a curriculum, but a constellation—each one addressing a different facet of the same underlying question: how do musicians learn to think, listen, and act musically in real time?
- Beyond Chords and Scales
- Footloose and Fancy-Free
- LEGO™ Building Blocks and Jazz Improvisation
- Making the Changes
- Rhythm Section Techniques and Solutions
- Strategies for Introducing Jazz Improvisation to Your Students
- Demystifying Jazz
Additional information regarding clinician, adjudication, and masterclass engagements is available here.
