Doc's Jazz Music Reviews

Improvise Like a Jazz Musician - Stepcase Lifehack: "Improvise Like a Jazz Musician
Or: Everything I Need to Know About Productivity I learned from Charles Mingus
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Interesting article by "Dustin Wax" that I ran across and decided to include it here on the blog. The link is included above.
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You don’t think of Charles Mingus‘ autobiography Beneath the Underdog as a productivity book, and it’s not, really. Mingus was one of Jazz’s great composers, as well as a great bass player. Plagued by depression, Mingus invested himself heavily in psychotherapy, and Beneath the Underdog is a kind of reflection on his life and music through the filter of his therapy.

But Mingus had a kind of wisdom in his approach to life and to music that is, I think, of great value in today’s innovation-based culture. He was deeply committed to the art of improvisation, even developing his own music notation system for his compositions so that musicians wouldn’t be limited to playing a specific note for a specific length of time; instead, Mingus’ compositions make suggestions about what approximate note to play and for about how many beats they should play it..."