Five years ago I met Alan Jones. His sextet played a lunch event at Clackamas Community College where I was taking music courses. I had heard stories about him; an intense, bohemian, barefoot drummer. I knew he ran a school where some of the best jazz students in the a...

In the summer of 2013, I was granted the opportunity to travel with Alan Jones and an AJAM band to France to perform in the Vannes Jazz Festival. The band was comprised of myself on tenor saxophone, Noah Conrad on trumpet, Jonathan Lakey on bass, and Alan on drums. Pre...

This week’s Sunday Rhythm Quest was all about testing our connection to the pulse (and the resolving downbeat) while challenging our ears to preserve groove in the face of increasing polyrhythmic complexity. Over the course of the previous sessions, we have all become...

Practicing is the art of being your own teacher – developing the skills that allows one to obtain a greater understanding of the components of music that captivate you. It is a continuous analytical process that helps the student gain knowledge of their craft as well a...

Things are really starting to take shape at the Sunday Rhythm Quest as we enter our 5th session! Using an African 12/8 bell pattern as a starting point, we have since branched out into an investigation of deriving multiple time streams from a given pulse (for our purpo...

Honesty was the topic of my lesson today with Alan. Honesty, having many interpretations in our language, is just a word Alan used to describe a mysterious and powerful state of existence.

We started with the word groove. He asked me what groove is. After some thought,...