Music for Lifelong Achievement seeks instrument donations for local students

If you have an old, unused, or extra musical instrument taking up space in the basement, garage or spare room, consider donating it to Music for Lifelong Achievement (MFLA).

MFLA is a local not-for-profit organization based at the Sheldon Concert Hall that collects used and new musical instruments and donates them to school and community music programs serving disadvantaged young people. Since its inception, MFLA has provided nearly 600 instruments to music students all over the St. Louis area.

MFLA's annual instrument drive began this past Monday, September 26 and will continue through Sunday, October 30.

There are two ways to help: by giving a musical instrument, or giving cash. Selected St. Louis-area Starbucks stores once again will serve as drop-off locations for used and new musical instruments during the drive. The donated instruments then will be repaired, if needed, and distributed to students who otherwise would not be able to afford an instrument. Donors get a letter documenting the value of the instrument for tax deduction purposes.

If you don’t have an instrument to donate, MFLA gladly accepts cash contributions, which are used to help pay for necessary repairs of donated instruments and provide accessories such as strings, reeds, and sheet music. These donations also are tax deductible. For more information or to make a donation, call The Sheldon at 314-533-9900 or visit www.supportmfla.org.

So What: Local News, Notes & Links

It's been a week of various difficulties, technical and otherwise, here at StLJN HQ, but even though this post may be a bit later than usual, you'll still want to check out these short news items and assorted links from the past few days:

* According to posts this week on social media, bassist David Troncoso died on Monday, July 11 of complications from cancer. He was 70 years old.

Originally from Montebello, CA, Troncoso (pictured) was known particularly for his expertise in Latin jazz, but he played with a variety of St. Louis musicians and bands, as well as with nationally and internationally known performers including Carmen McRae, Peter Nero, Eddie Cano, Bobby Hutcherson, Clare Fischer, Nino Tempo, and more.

In addition to earning wide respect for his musical skills, Troncoso also is being remembered as a devoted dad, friend, and animal lover with a sharp sense of humor. No memorial service will be held, but according to his son Dave "Don Tron" Troncoso, plans for a musical "celebration of life" will be announced at a later date. Our condolences go out to David Troncoso's family, friends and musical associates.

* Jazz St. Louis' Gene Dobbs Bradford will lead a "Jazz History Ride" being offered to local bicycle enthusiasts tomorrow by Trailnet. The tour of "local jazz landmarks" starts at 10 a.m.; for details and last-minute registration info, go here.

* Saxophonist Oliver Lake was the subject of a brief feature story in SF Weekly previewing an upcoming gig in the Bay Area. .

* Saxophonist Eric Person and his band Meta-Four have booked a return appearance at NYC's Blue Note Jazz Club on Monday, September 19.

* Pianist Peter Martin's Open Studio Network has announced the pending release of yet another jazz education course on video, "Fundamentals of Jazz Trumpet" as taught by Sean Jones.

Music Education Monday: A jazz guitar workshop with Barney Kessel

Today for Music Education Monday, you can get a video lesson from the legendary guitarist Barney Kessel. Some younger musicians and fans understandably might not know Kessel (pictured), who died of a brain tumor in 2004 and previously had been inactive since suffering a stroke back in 1992, but for a long stretch of the 20th century, he was one of the busiest and most respected jazz guitarists in the world.

Born in 1923 in Muskogee, OK - yes, the very same town later immortalized in song by Merle Haggard - Kessel began his career as a teenager influenced by Charlie Christian, working with local bands and later, interesting, doing a brief stint with a unit led by Chico Marx of the Marx Brothers. After landing in NYC, in the 1940s and 50s he performed and recorded with jazz greats including Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, Sonny Rollins, and many more, and ultimately went on to make more than 30 albums under his own name as well.

His trio recordings with Ray Brown on bass and Shelly Manne on drums offer some good examples of Kessel's signature "chord-melody" style, which, as the name implies, involves improvising by playing chords with (usually) top notes that simultaneously express melodic ideas.

During the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Kessel also was one of the most in-demand session guitarists in America, playing thousands of recording sessions for movies and TV and with the musicians now known collectively as "The Wrecking Crew," who made hundreds of famous pop records with Phil Spector, The Beach Boys, The Monkees, and many others. He was well known enough during this period that Gibson made a Barney Kessel signature model from 1961 to 1973.

Later in his career, Kessel presented guitar workshops and master classes in various locations around the world, and worked in a trio format with Herb Ellis and Charlie Byrd as "The Great Guitars".

The embedded video below, recorded in the 1980s, features Kessel teaching improvisation concepts in the chord-melody style, including "how to play what you hear, fills, turnarounds, the building blocks of improvisation," and the blues.

So What: Local News, Notes & Links

Here's this week's wrap-up of assorted links and short news items of local interest:

* The late trumpeter and St. Louis native Clark Terry was among the recently deceased musicians, singers, and music business figures remembered at this year's Grammy Awards ceremony and telecast on Monday night. Terry can be seen, and a tiny snippet of his signature song "Mumbles" heard (in what looks like an excerpt from PBS' Legends of Jazz series) at approximately 1:28 into the Grammy memorial/tribute video.

* Saxophonist Greg Osby talked about his record label Inner Circle Music in an extensive interview with Jakob Baekgaard of AllAboutJazz.com.

* Vinyl collectors and aficionados, be advised that Euclid Records will be having a "Giant Colossal Mega-Whopper of a 2 Dollar Vinyl Sale" on Saturday, February 27 and Sunday, February 28. Given the store's extensive stock of jazz records, it seems likely there may be some items of interest to StLJN readers among those $2 selections.

* The STL Free Jazz Collective has posted to YouTube full-length videos of both sets of their recent concert for Washington University's Jazz at Holmes series.

* Bruxism, the series of experimental music performances run by multi-instrumentalist Nathan Cook (aka NNN Cook), is the subject of a feature story from St. Louis magazine.

* Keyboardist and singer Jesse Gannon (pictured) has posted online a new song, "Take Your Time," that's described as "the first of a series of monthly singles to be released in 2016." You can listen, purchase the track, or subscribe to the series via Gannon's website.

* Multi-instrumentalist Sandy Weltman, who plays a standard diatonic harp with virtuoso skill in styles from bebop to bluegrass, will be teaching a group harmonica class at 7:00 p.m. Tuesdays starting March 1 and continuing through April 19 at City Music. For details or to sign up, go to the City Music website.

* Dance St. Louis will include recordings of music by Miles Davis and Lester Bowie into “New Dance Horizons IV: A Celebration inspired by St. Louis’ Legendary Black Artists” on Friday, February 26 and Saturday, February 27 at the Touhill Performing Arts Center.

Music Education Monday: Workshops with saxophonist Steve Coleman

Though he doesn't categorize his music as "jazz," Steve Coleman has been a significant player on the contemporary improvised music scene since the 1980s as a saxophonist, composer, bandleader, and educator.

A 2014 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (aka "the genius grant"), Coleman (pictured) is a 59-year-old Chicago native who's been called "one of the most rigorously conceptual thinkers in improvised music" by the New York Times.

He's noted particularly as one of the originators and chief promulgator of M-BASE, an acronym for "Macro–Basic Array of Structured Extemporizations." As explained by Coleman, it's not a musical style, but rather a conceptual approach - "a way of thinking about creating music."

Without getting too much more into the specifics, suffice it to say that Coleman has a lot of interesting ideas, and today for Music Education Monday, you can get a sampling of some of them by checking out videos from a series of workshops that he conducted from May through October of 2013 at Seeds, a performance space and gallery in the NYC borough of Brooklyn.

There are five videos in total, each including a combination of performance, lecture, and discussion, adding up to nearly fifteen hours worth of content.

You can see the videos after the jump...

Music Education Monday: A workshop with saxophonist Dewey Redman

Today for Music Education Monday, you can take in a workshop with saxophonist Dewey Redman, the late Texas tenor man known for his big, bluesy tone, his associations with Ornette Coleman and Keith Jarrett, and these days, for being the father of saxophonist Joshua Redman.

The elder Redman, who died in 2006, was born in 1931 in Fort Worth and went to high school with Ornette Coleman, forming a friendship that would last a lifetime. He played in Coleman's band from 1968 to 1972, and later started the group Old And New Dreams with fellow Coleman alumni Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell, releasing four albums of music influenced by their former employer.

Redman was much more than just a Coleman disciple, though, putting out a dozen albums under his own name, and a dozen more with Jarrett, recorded during the 1970s when he was a member of the pianist's "American Quartet." He also also performed and recorded with Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, Paul Motian, Pat Metheny, and numerous other jazz musicians active during the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1993, Redman went back to Texas to conduct a workshop with students at Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and fortunately, someone had the presence of mind to record the event on video. You can see that video of Redman's workshop, presented in three parts, after the jump.

And if you're curious to know more about Dewey Redman, he was the subject of an award-winning documentary film, Dewey Time: The Sound of A Giant, released in 2001. You can see that film in its entirety in the fourth video embed below...

Music Education Monday: Yale University's open online course "Listening to Music"

This week for Music Education Monday, let's class up this joint a little bit with a free online course from one of the world's great universities.

"Listening to Music" is described by Yale professor Craig Wright as "the most basic course that the department of music has to offer," but for those who don't have a degree in music or haven't done much formal study at all, the series of video lectures contains plenty of potentially useful information.

Recorded in the autumn of 2008, the course aims to familiarize students with "the basic elements of Western classical music, such as rhythm, melody, and form," through which they will learn "strategies that can be used to understand many different kinds of music in a more thorough and precise way."

There are a total of 23 lectures, most ranging in length from 45 to 50 minutes, and Professor Wright uses examples from jazz, blues, techno and musical theater as well as from many classical works to demonstrate his points. There also are course materials available at the Yale Online website.

After the jump, you can see a complete list of the individual lectures, along with an embedded video window containing a playlist showing all of them in order...

So What: Local News, Notes & Links

Here's the latest wrap-up of assorted links and short news items of local interest:

* Euclid Records has acquired the vinyl collection of the late St. Louis jazz DJ Leo Chears, and will be offering 6000 items from it this weekend in what they're calling "The Red Vest Sale" in a nod to Chears' signature apparel.

Chears (pictured), who died in 2006, had jazz programs on WAMV, KADI, KSD, WESL and WRTH over the course of a career than spanned five decades. Euclid's sale runs Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at their store in Webster Groves.

* Tim Schall, performer, producer and faculty member of the St. Louis Cabaret Conference, and Carol Schmidt, pianist and music director for a number of St. Louis performers, will be teaching two classes for aspiring cabaret singers this fall. "Cabaret 101" begins Monday, September 21 and runs for four weeks, followed directly by "Cabaret 201," which begins on Monday, October 19 and concludes on November 9

* Also on the education beat, multi-instrumentalist Adam Rugo will be teaching an African Drum Ensemble course starting Wednesday, September 16 at St. Louis Community College at Forest Park. No previous experience is required, and drums are provided. To sign up, go to http://www.stlcc.edu/mySTLCC and use the self-service system to register for MUS 144.

* Pianist Peter Martin is a partner in a new startup, Open Studio Network, which will offer online music lessons from Martin and other well-known musicians, so far including guitarist Romero Lumbabo and drummer Greg Hutchinson.

* Saxophonist Eric Person has posted to Facebook a photo album of a recent gig with trumpeter Wallace Roney.

* Drummer Dave Weckl's Acoustic Band will be touring Asia this month, starting September 15 in Seoul, South Korea. The group which also features St. Louis native Tom Kennedy on bass along with pianist Makoto Ozone and saxophonist Gary Meek, will go on to play multiple dates in Japan before finishing up September 27 in Taiwan.

* The late trumpeter and St. Louis native Clark Terry figures prominently in an archival article about jazz on television in 1965 that was reposted this week by DownBeat.

* Saxophonist Oliver Lake has posted to YouTube a video from his residency last fall at The Stone in NYC - specifically, an excerpt from a set with drummers Bill McClellan and Ed Nicholson.

Music Education Monday: Audio recording basics

This week for "Music Education Monday," we've got links to some guides available for free online to help musicians who want to learn the basics of audio recording.

(Note that this time, we're covering printed materials only; a future installment will attempt to recommend some of the many, many audio recording tutorials now available on YouTube.)

As you'd expect, a number of companies that make products used in the recording process publish instructional materials to help potential customers understand that process and how those products might be used in it.

The quality of these can vary widely, but three that seem at least worth a look are "Basics: Home Recording and Podcasting" from the microphone manufacturer Shure; "How to Capture Your Art - An Introduction To Multitrack Recording from TASCAM"; and "Basics of Modern Recording," from Roland, manufacturers of a variety of music and recording gear.

Universities are another good source for this sort of material, and the "Introduction to Sound Recording Technology" from Stanford University's well-respected Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics is a useful overview of its subject.

Lastly, for a more in-depth look, you can check out a 278-page PDF representing the complete course notes for "Music and Technology: Recording Techniques and Audio Production" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  These are course notes, rather than an actual textbook, so you'll need to do some additional searching, reading and follow-up to get the maximum benefit, but at the very least, it's a cheap way to get a sense of just how much there is to learn about the topic.

Have you run across any other free online instructional materials or tutorials about recording that you found to be particularly useful? If so, please share in the comments...

Music Education Monday: Trumpet solos transcribed, plus master classes with Ingrid Jensen and Brian Lynch

This week's "Music Education Monday" is especially for trumpeters, with links to hundreds of solo transcriptions plus a couple of master classes from well-known pros:

* The website Jazz Trumpet Transcriptions does just what it says on the tin, with a total of 305 trumpet solo transcriptions available, plus 186 MIDI files of associated tunes.

Those transcriptions by French trumpeter Jacques Gilbert, plus more than 500 additional transcribed trumpet solos that are available for free on the Internet, also are indexed and linked on this page at Saxopedia.com.

* Also on the music-ed menu today are master classes from jazz trumpeters Ingrid Jensen and Brian Lynch.

Jensen (pictured) is a Berklee graduate who has recorded seven albums as a leader over the last 20 years. She also works regularly in the Maria Schneider Orchestra, and has performed or recorded with musicians including saxophonist Virginia Mayhew, pianist Geoff Keezer, singers Judi Silvano and Chris Conner, and many more. Her master class seen below was recorded earlier this year during the "Winter Jazz Blast" at McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul, MN.

Brian Lynch is known for his work with saxophonist Phil Woods and in Latin jazz with musicians including pianist Eddie Palmieri and trombonist Conrad Herwig. Lynch's album with Palmieri, The Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri Recording Project - Simpatico won the Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album in 2007. Lynch also is a faculty member at NYU's Steinhardt School, which is where his video master class seen below was made.

You can see both videos after the jump...

Music Education Monday: Summer jazz camps in St. Louis

Summer's almost here, but there's still time for aspiring young jazz musicians in the St. Louis area to enroll in one or more of the summer jazz camps being presented by local universities:

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville will hold its annual camp for students at "all levels, grades 8-12" from Monday, June 1 through Friday, June 5 on the SIUE campus. Classes are taught by members of the SIUE jazz faculty. For details or to sign up, go to http://www.siue.edu/artsandsciences/music/community/jazz-camp.shtml.

Bassist Jim Widner's big band will serve as the faculty for the annual University of Missouri - St. Louis jazz camp, with instructors including Widner, Scott Whitfield, Dave Scott, Ken Kehner, Rod Fleeman, Chip McNeill, Kim Richmond, Gary Hobbs, and others. The camp for "students of all ages and talent levels" will be held Monday, June 7 through Friday, June 12 on the UMSL campus. For more information or to enroll, visit http://www.umsl.edu/~pcs/noncredit-offerings/jazz-camp.html.

Webster University's annual camp for "beginning, intermediate and advanced level jazz improvisers and instrumentalists" will take place from Monday, July 6 through Friday, July 10 on the Webster U campus, with instruction from the university's jazz faculty. You can find more information and a signup form at http://www.webster.edu/fine-arts/departments/music/summer-programs/jazz-camp.html

Music Education Monday: Six-month index

It's been six months since StLJN's "Music Education Monday" feature began, and since the idea here is to make this information easily accessible to as many people as possible, now seems like a good time to index all the related posts so far.

The series will continue with a new entry next week In the meantime, here's your chance to catch up with any of the previous posts you may have missed:

* A master class in understanding audio formats
* A master class with percussionist Milford Graves
* Still all about that bass (with Ray Brown and Milt Hinton)
* Jazz piano lessons from Mike Wolff and Barry Harris
* John Abercrombie on jazz guitar improvisation
* Sound system basics
* Aebersold's "Jazz Handbook," plus Latin percussion classes with Dafnis Prieto
* Electronic music production tips, plus a keyboard workshop with Richard Tee
* Arranging 101
* Saxophone master classes with Greg Osby
* Inside the musical mind of Bill Evans
* A jazz improvisation primer and video workshop
* Fusion fundamentals with Lorber, Haslip & Marienthal
* Books, both fake and Real
* What's the score?
* Video workshops with Urbie Green & Delfeayo Marsalis
* Behind the score of Birdman with drummer Antonio Sanchez
* A jazz guitar master class with Jim Hall
* Free play-along recordings, and a free class from Gary Burton
* All about that bass
* Microphone basics, and some studio tips from Al Schmitt
* A Benny Golson master class, and the Saxophone Museum
* A music theory reference, and a Matt Wilson master class
* Monk's advice and Bishop's fourths
* Saxophonists speak out, and a musician's guide to copyright
* "Visual Reference for Musicians" & "Cymbals 101"
* Electronic music history, and a Clark Terry master class
* "Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People" & The Red Hot Jazz Archive

Music Education Monday: A master class in understanding audio formats

This week's "Music Education Monday" explores a subject that's rather technical, but nevertheless of interest to any working musician who wants to distribute audio to the public.

Engineer Andrew Scheps is a music industry veteran who has won two Grammys and logged credits working with major pop, rock and hip-hop acts including Adele, U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Black Sabbath, Jay-Z, and Metallica.

Working with the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, Scheps (pictured) also has put together a presentation about audio quality called “Lost in Translation” that compares many current music services to demonstrate the audible differences among the various file formats, from MP3 and AIFF to FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and more.

Today, we've got two ways you can glean some of the info Scheps is offering. He was interviewed by Electronic Musician magazine for a very detailed article titled "Masterclass: Andrew Scheps, 'Lost In Translation,' and Understanding Consumer Audio Formats," which you can read online here.

Scheps also has been giving the presentation to a variety of groups in the tech, media, and music industries, and so you can see "Lost in Translation: Audio Quality in Streaming Media," as delivered for the "Talks at Google" series at Google HQ in California, in the embedded video window below.

Music Education Monday: A master class with percussionist Milford Graves

The week for "Music Education Monday," we've got a different kind of master class for drummers.

While most drum workshops are full of talk of exercises, licks and rudiments, Milford Graves deals with concepts and philosophy as much as technique, as befits his status as one of the elder statesmen of free jazz drumming.

First coming to prominence in the 1960s, Graves played with the New York Art Quartet, Jazz Composers' Orchestra Association, Albert Ayler, Don Pullen, and others important innovators during that period. He's known for integrating African and Indian elements into his playing, perhaps drawing on early work in the bands of Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba and definitely making use of his extensive studies of the tabla drums. More recently, Graves has enjoyed something of a career resurgence, recording for John Zorn's label and collaborating with a younger generation of musicians.

Working with young people was nothing new for Graves, though, given that he taught at Bennington College in Vermont for nearly thirty years. He also is an herbalist, acupuncturist, and martial artist who draws on all those life experiences to inform his music, as you'll hear in this master class recorded in 2014 at the New School in NYC.

You can see the Milford Graves master class, in three parts, after the jump...

Music Education Monday: Still all about that bass (with Ray Brown and Milt Hinton)

As yr. humble editor is not one to leave any good material unused, or any bad pun or pop culture reference unmade - at least of couple times - today's "Music Education Monday" post is a sequel to last December's "All About That Bass", featuring a few more bass-related links and video clips that turned up during the info-gathering for that post.

Keeping in mind that the general criteria here is "music instructional materials available for free on the internet," bassists may find some items worthy of perusal at the aptly named InstituteOfBass.com, which offers free online lessons from bassists including Michael Manring (who's coming to St. Louis to perform next month), Cliff Engel, Todd Johnson, Ray Riendeau and others.

Also worth a look are the handout materials put together by bassist and jazz educator Lou Fischer for a master class in jazz bass presented as part of a "Music for All Summer Symposium" sponsored by Yamaha. You can download the notes in PDF format here.

And if you've ever wondered how a bunch of local Detroit jazz musicians used their skills and experience to create some of the biggest pop hits of the 20th century, check out "James Jamerson: From Jazz Bassist to Popular Music Icon," a master's thesis by a Texas jazz student that has some interesting info and insights about the bassist who provided the backbone for many of Motown's greatest recordings.

On the video front, we have lessons from two masters of swinging, straight-ahead jazz. The first clip features a short-but-sweet lesson from the late Milt Hinton, who played with many of the major jazz musicians active during his lifetime and did thousands of recording sessions in a career that stretched from the 1930s to the 1990s.

After that, there's an entire master class from Ray Brown (pictured), who was celebrated as one of the top bassists in jazz for his work with Ella Fitzgerald (who also was married to Brown for six years); Oscar Peterson, who employed Brown as his bassist of choice for several decades; and others.

You can see the videos of Milt Hinton and Ray Brown after the jump...

Music Education Monday: Jazz piano lessons from Mike Wolff and Barry Harris

Today for "Music Education Monday," we've got some video lessons that nominally are intended for jazz pianists, but also contain information that may be of interest to jazz improvisors in general.

Pianist Mike Wolff is know for his early work with Cal Tjader, Cannonball Adderly and Nancy Wilson, for leading the house band on the original Arsenio Hall Show in the 1990s, and more recently, for film scoring work and collaborations including the Wolff & Clark Expedition with former Headhunters drummer Mike Clark.

Today's first video is an hour-long master class that Wolff gave back in 2011 for students at Loyola University in New Orleans, in which he touches on a variety of topics, from how his career developed to playing outside the changes to how he got fired by Jean-Luc Ponty, and much more.

Below that, there are three shorter video featuring pianist Barry Harris. A native of Detroit, Harris (pictured) has run the gamut from swing to bop to modern jazz in his 85 years, performing with major musicians including Sonny Stitt, Illinois Jacquet, Coleman Hawkins, Dexter Gordon, Lee Morgan, Charles McPherson, Max Roach, and many more. He's also been heavily involved in jazz education, giving master classes at colleges and universities all over the world.

Harris also worked with NYC's Jazz at Lincoln Center last year to produce a video for their "Jazz Academy" series, in which he discusses some of his concepts of jazz theory and harmony.

After that, you can see two clips that are part of a series of videos of Harris recorded by Dutch piano player and educator Frans Elsen between 1989 and 1998 at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. In the first, Harris discusses his affinity for the 6th diminished scale, and how to use it in accompaniment and improvisation; in the second, he breaks down his approach to the famously challenging John Coltrane composition "Giant Steps."

You can see today's videos after the jump...

Music Education Monday: John Abercrombie on jazz guitar improvisation

While guitarist John Abercrombie was in St. Louis last week to lead his quartet in a sold-out performance for the Jazz at Holmes series at Washington University, he and pianist Marc Copland also did an afternoon master class on the Wash U campus.

Fortunately for those who missed out, a while back Abercrombie (pictured) recorded an instructional video for Homespun Tapes about his concepts for jazz guitar improvisation. That video has found its way onto YouTube and can be seen in the first embedded window below.

Also, for more about Abercrombie's influences, career, musical philosophy, and more, check out the second embed, which contains an extended conversation between Abercrombie and Dr. David Schroeder of NYU, recorded last July at SubCulture in New York as part of the university's Steinhardt Jazz Interview Series.

Music Education Monday: Sound system basics

While sound reinforcement is a complex and changing field even for full-time professionals, every working musician can benefit from a basic knowledge of how sound systems work and how to set up and operate a simple PA (public address) system. So for this week's "Music Education Monday," here are some links to free resources on the web that provide useful and relatively concise introductory material on the topic:

* From Live Systems, a sound contractor in the UK, here's a primer on "Public Address (PA) Basics."

* From the audio gear manufacturer PreSonus, a closer look at "How To Configure Your PA System."

* Another audio gear manufacturer, Rane, delves further into the potentially mysterious world of gain structures with a tutorial on "Setting sound system level controls."

* And in an article that's a few years old but still pertinent, the pros at Mix magazine offer a "Back to Basics" presentation on "Sound System Setup, Tuning and Optimization."

In the video windows after the jump, you can see two more audio-related presentations. The first, "Audio 101 - How to do a pro sound check," though presented from the mixing engineer's point of view, offers an idea of what musicians can expect at a larger, multi-artist show, like a festival, for which you may be dealing with limited setup time and audio support personnel who don't know your music already.

The second, "Observing the Setup & Operation of a Stadium PA," is an extended walk-though of the entire procedure of setting up and running a PA for a big outdoor show. While the scale is much larger than for a typical jazz gig, and there's a lot more heavy lifting involved, the underlying task is essentially the same.

As so often happens here on "Music Education Monday," these materials may help you get started, but there's a lot more to the topic. Have you found other useful tutorials or instructional materials about sound reinforcement available online for free? If so, please share your favorites in the comments. You can see the videos after the jump...

Music Education Monday: Aebersold's "Jazz Handbook," plus Latin percussion classes with Dafnis Prieto

This week for "Music Education Monday," we've got a primer for aspiring jazz players that also may be of interest to non-playing fans, plus a master class in Latin percussion techniques:

* Known throughout the jazz world as a leading purveyor of jazz education materials and proprietor of summer jazz camps, saxophonist and educator Jamey Aebersold for years also has given away for free a 56-page tome called simply Jazz Handbook.

While aimed primarily at beginning and intermediate musicians, the collection of exercises, lists, short articles, and more also conceivably may be of interest to more advanced musicians, and even to fans looking for some basic "Jazz 101" type knowledge.

You can download a free copy of the Jazz Handbook in PDF format here.

* In addition to being a busy working musician, Cuban-born percussionist Dafnis Prieto also is a professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School, a frequent clinician at other colleges and universities, and a 2011 winner of a Macarthur Fellowship, aka "the genius grant." (St. Louis jazz fans also may recall Prieto from when his trio played at Jazz at the Bistro back in 2012.)

In the video windows below, you can check out two lessons from Prieto. The first is a playlist of excerpts from a master class he did a few years ago at Loyola University in New Orleans, in which he offers an overview of various Latin percussion styles and how to play them. In the second, Prieto gives a full lesson specifically on "rhythmic independence within Latin drumming" and plays a solo demonstrating some of his concepts.

Music Education Monday: Electronic music production tips, plus a keyboard workshop with Richard Tee

This week for "Music Education Monday," we've got some new info on electronic music production techniques, and a classic video workshop with a top session keyboardist:

* Ableton, makers of the popular Ableton Live software used for electronic music production, has put online a good-sized chunk of the new book Making Music: Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers, which purports to offer "a collection of solutions to common roadblocks in the creative process, with a specific emphasis on solving musical problems, making progress, and (most importantly) finishing what you start."

The book's website includes includes eight full chapters of the 25 included in the print edition, covering topics such as active listening, presets as starting points, and "procrastination and timeboxing." If you have even a passing interest in the techniques being discussed, it's worth a look.

* In the video window below, you can watch Contemporary Piano With Richard Tee, a video workshop released in 1984 featuring the late gospel-influenced keyboardist who was a first-call NYC session man from the late 1960s until his death in 1993.

A co-founder of the influential instrumental group Stuff, Richard Tee was well known in the jazz world for his work with Hank Crawford, George Benson and Grover Washington Jr., and also did tours and recording sessions with many other famous jazz, R&B, rock and pop musicians and singers. The video features Tee discussing topics including practice techniques, chord substitutions, left-hand technique, how to back a vocalist, and how to play in studio sessions.