Behind the Editor’s Desk

Every few weeks, I receive a letter from another prison inmate requesting free Berklee Press books. These letters are always handwritten and polite. I have a folder of them.

I’ve tried several times to fulfill these requests, but there are complications, and I’ve found it inordinately complex (impossible, so far) to make it happen, much as I want to. Maybe, someone out there will have some ideas of organizations that can help me navigate this. I really don’t have the time or resources to make this happen, myself. I feel badly about saying no, though.

Consider, what better way can an inmate spend their time, besides making music? It not only relieves the tedium and the tension, but it develops a skill that can make the world a better place. Studying music in prison creates a diversion that might keep prison guards safer. Learning music is a forum for introspection and an exercise in self-control. A music book in a jail cell could put some light in a dark place. So, when a prisoner begs me for book about how to learn guitar, I want to make it happen. Even if he’s a murderer.

There are some complicating factors, though. For example, there are many rules governing what kinds of materials inmates can receive, and they vary by institution, and by state. Many prisons don’t permit CDs. At some institutions, only the librarian can request books. Other institutions don’t have libraries, and so different administrators are charged with such decisions. The bureaucracies tend to be Byzantine, figuring out the proper procedure for a given institution.

There are hurdles on the Berklee side, as well. Berklee College has a long list of people asking for free stuff from them, and others (rightfully, in my opinion) take precedence. Inner-city kids, for example, or musicians struggling in New Orleans. Wonderful Berklee efforts such as City Music provide incredible outreach and service to communities worldwide.

It’s no surprise or criticism that we take better care of  young musicians still struggling with the Katrina aftermath than in incarcerated murderers, pimps, drug dealers, etc.   There are so many opportunities to help more deserving constituencies that we never get to, it’s really not such a good allocation of limited resources to send prisoners free books.

Still, though, the prisoner requests keep coming to me.
As I see it, two things must happen in order to get inmates books.

1. Someone official at the institution must administer the request, not the inmate. This requires about five rounds of communication, judging from my past experience. Unfortunately, I don’t personally have the administrative capacity to undertake transforming inmate requests into institutional requests. Do you? Or do you know of an organization that does? A couple hours per request should do it. (Maybe less, once you get the hang of it, and develop some form letters.)

2. An entity other than Berklee College must pay for the book and administer the process. You, maybe?

Let me know if you have any thoughts about how to make this happen. I’m out of ideas (and time to think about it), myself.

There isn’t much reason to compare the works of Yoron Israel and Pablo Peña. Both are killer drummers, Pablo studied with Yoron, and they each released a Berklee Press DVD this past Fall. As the producer of both projects, which were filmed back to back on two consecutive days, I worked with both artists simultaneously, and so for me, considering them together has been natural and an interesting exploration about the drum set generally.

Yoron’s DVD is “Creative Jazz Improvisation for Drum Set.”

Pablo’s DVD is “New World Drumming.”

Pablo comes from the Dominican Republic, where he founded and still runs a music school. He came to Berklee via some passionate and active advocacy from two artists of international repute. He is the only Berklee student ever to publish with Berklee Press while still enrolled. Pablo’s project concept was initially pitched to Berklee Press by someone high enough up in the Berklee administration that I stand when speaking to him on the phone. So, we gave Pablo the benefit of a doubt, despite his not being a faculty member.

I was invited to a workshop Pablo was presenting, and was just astonished at the things he was doing with a drum set. In addition to incorporating a tambora into his kit, which would ordinarily completely occupy both of a drummer’s hands (and 100% of his concentration), Pablo was playing several different pedals with each foot—essentially playing a groove with about ten instrument sounds simultaneously. This is ridiculous. This is “disgusting,” as Victor Mendoza likes to say about particularly gifted students. This needs to be caught on film, and he needs to explain it in slow motion.

Then, asking around, one of Berklee’s top faculty drummers—who I will add is not the easiest person in the world to impress—stated emphatically, “Pablo is going to become a drum hero. Unless he falls into drugs or has some major crisis, he is going to become a drum hero.” And then, I learned that several teachers were actually taking lessons from him. He’s not the average student, so we made an exception, and signed him up.

Shooting videos is expensive and complex, partly because a lot of lighting and sound equipment must be rented and set up. For this reason, it makes economic sense to film more than one video in the same session. So, when we signed Pablo, I was asked to scout out another viable drum DVD project, which meant finding another drummer to quickly come up with a solid product concept for us to film on a day adjacent to Pablo’s filming date.

The obvious choice to help us do something as vastly complex as this in such a pinch was Yoron Israel, assistant chair of the percussion department. Yoron is, in my opinion, among the most musical and gifted drummers I’ve ever heard. Pablo’s music makes me think, “It is impossible for a human to groove like that.” Yoron’s music makes me think, “What a beautiful story.” Yoron is also known as being rock-solid reliable, and the consummate professional, teacher, and gentleman. So, he was a natural fit, and I was very pleased and honored that he accepted my request (plea?) to do a DVD with us under those circumstances.

The results were terrific. Pablo’s DVD shows how to incorporate elements of world percussion technique and language into your groove, and expands the possibilities of what the drum set can do. He methodically breaks down his impossible grooves, showing the role of the clave, etc., and somehow makes it seem within the realm of human possibility. Yoron’s DVD gives unique insight into the creative process of drum-set soloing, showing how factors such as rhythm and melody can inspire soloing ideas, and how to have a strong narrative concept in the solo. Both DVDs feature inspiring, gorgeous performance footage of some wonderful and unique musicianship. I’ve watched both drummers and non-drummers watch these DVDs, utterly captivated.

Quick story: After we were done filming, Director Bob Monagle gave us a ride to the airport. Bob’s radio was set to a jazz station.

Bob said to Yoron, “So what else are you up to?”

Yoron answered, “Actually, I just finished the recording that we’re listening to right now!”

Talk about a made for Hollywood moment! That’s like sitting next to someone a bus who is reading a book you’ve written. Or edited. That’s my fantasy! I think the recording was one of the ones he did with David Fathead Newman.

Anyhow, as a duo, these two DVDs represent an incredible breath of what drumming is and can be. Both musicians have something unique to say, each in their own individual ways, and both make such wonderful music and share such profound and practical insights into how they do it.

I’ll add that everyone at the Tanner/Monagle studio was first rate, and both fun and informative to work with, particularly director Bob Monagle. If you ever need a recording/video/post-production studio in Milwaukee, I recommend them highly.

Any musician would find these performances fascinating. Particularly drummers will find them inspiring and informative.

The same essential body of knowledge can be taught via books or online courses. At Berklee, the book-publishing arm (Berklee Press) and the online school (Berkleemusic) are organized under the same division, Berklee Media. Until recently, we even shared staff, and even now, there is much overlap between who is writing books and who is developing online courses. My office is right next to that of Debbie Cavalier, the Dean of Continuing Education, and we constantly send potential authors back and forth to each other. Many authors (Dave Kusek, Jimmy Kachulis, Dan Thompson, Eric Beall, and many, many others) have written both books and online courses on the same material, and they use their books as textbooks for their courses. And sometimes, an author will pitch a concept to one of us or the other, and we’ll say, “This would work better as a book,” or “This would be a great online course.”

From the author’s perspective, the processes of writing each are very similar. They both entail looking at the subject, organizing what topics get presented in what order, and crafting how best to articulate concepts.

But there are differences that anyone developing either one (or both) should keep in mind. By playing to the strengths of each medium, the final products can be optimized for the best user experience.

1. Online courses at Berkleemusic are highly interactive. Students post assignments for review by the instructor and other students. Students ask questions. This is perhaps the richest dimension of the online experience, and high quality courses are designed to facilitate meaningful communication. Interactivity and communication are chief benefits of online courses over books, and they exponentially magnify the learning experience.

2. Integration between media types in online courses can be deeper, more prevalent, and more seamless than in books. Many books have accompanying CDs or even DVDs, but it is relatively cumbersome to switch between reading a book and listening to a CD. Online, it is natural to read a paragraph, take a Flash quiz, and watch a video, all on the same page. The multimedia experience is the other chief educational advantage of online courses.

3. Books can vary in depth and breadth more than the standard 12-week online course format can, and different books have different types of purposes and grandiosity of ambition. A course must always be a deep, substantial hunk of education that significantly raises students’ capabilities and understanding. Books, though, can be more focused, such as Gilson Schachnik’s new Beginning Ear Training (the one with the elephant), which is essentially a set of ear training practice exercises with minimal pedagogical rumination. Or, books can be deep and comprehensive, such as Dan Thompson’s Understanding Audio, which shows how an intimate understanding of the physics of sound can transform your disappointing, lackluster plink-plank-plunk of a guitar sound into a banshee-screaming fire engine of a groove machine. As is Dan’s wont.

Courses conform to schedules, and for that reason, they must have tighter parameters regarding the amount of content they present. Books, though, can have chapters or appendixes that might potentially be relatively advanced or esoteric to some readers. A big chart with tons of detail might work nicely in a book but be awkward in a course. It’s not such a big deal for a reader to skip a chapter in a book, compared to skipping a week of a course.

Beyond the schedule, courses have to conform to other standards, particularly if they are associated with academic institutions such as Berklee. The ones here at Berkleemusic are NEASC accredited, college level courses. This means a number of things, in terms of academic rigor, substantial homework assignments, student assessments, credentials of authors and instructors, and so on. And if they are Berkleemusic courses, it goes without saying that the content must be aligned with that of Berklee College’s standards and scope. A course that’s part of a curriculum has different requirements and parameters than do most books, though certainly textbooks need to similarly be reflective and supportive of exterior factors.

4. Books are portable. You don’t need electricity, and you can read them in bed, on the beach, while seated at your piano, etc. Sure, you might do the same with your laptop, but it’s not as easy. You can give a book to someone else.

5. Reading a computer screen is more taxing than reading a book, and so varying media types are ideally interspersed, in writing online courses. Rather than just screens and screens of endless text, like an online book (which is what lesser online courses do than those we have at Berkleemusic), we enliven the readers’ experience by changing teaching/learning approach often. Good classroom teachers do this too. They lecture for a bit, then write something on the board, then ask a question. So online, text is interspersed with graphics, movies, audio clips, discussions, animations, and so on. This is how we keep students awake. It requires more collaboration between the author and courseware developers, graphics designer, and so on, than books.

In a book, it is fine to have just text or just music notation, though of course, graphics and accompanying recordings are often helpful. It’s generally subtler, though, more along the lines of presenting a concept, then exemplifying it, then perhaps practicing it, and so on, as a means of varying the reader’s perception mechanism. It might all happen in text.

6. The experience of reading and holding a book is more organic than the experience of viewing a computer screen. Readers can read a book at their own paces, without worrying about deadlines and project due dates. They can skip a chapter, read chapters out of order, or practice the same exercises every day for twenty years.

From a user perspective, the online experience is both more intense and more directed than the book-reading experience. The element of timing in a course adds structure to learning, which can inspire a greater flurry of effort from the student/reader. Then, the course ends, and the student and teacher say their good-byes.

Books are forever. A book can sit on your shelf and serve as a reference indefinitely. You might have a question long after you read a book, and so look something up in the index, spending two minutes per year with a book every year for the rest of your life.

7. Online courses are relatively easy to update. A teacher can post “Late breaking news” at any time, during an online course, and therefore add content on the fly, that’s not part of the traditional authoring process. If you are teaching a software program and there’s a new release, you can change your content quickly and easily. A book might become obsolete and appropriately go out of print in the same circumstance.

It’s helpful to have taught material before writing a book about it. This could be in an online course, a live course, a seminar, a private studio, or whatever. Students and other sounding boards help us to refine our ideas and align our pet priorities with real needs. Their questions and challenges are gifts that help us to maintain relevance. But there’s nothing like writing a book to deepen how well we really understand our subject. Writing, and dare I say being edited, gives us the space to articulate our ideas clearly, reworking a sentence or an explanation over and over until it’s rendered clearly. And when we uncover a gap in our understanding, we can go research it. We can read three other books about it, and then write the best explanation ever about how it really should be.

To a great extent, courses are defined by the students participating. For example, in my Finale course, some sections might have more music teachers, others more film composers, others more church choir directors. Everyone asks unique questions to address their personal work (which is the basis for their assignments), and this makes each course a unique journey, with a unique persona.

Courses are optimized to be journeys, rather than persistent references. They are little communities that last for a finite period where participants can potentially change each other’s lives. They are about human interaction as the means of transferring knowledge.

In a book, the author is an expert who takes the stage and rhapsodizes, uninterrupted. In an online course, the instructor says his bit, and then opens the floor to discussion. In courses, the transfer of knowledge is more customized to the reader, and less predictable. In books, subjects can be more deeply articulated.

While the author’s effort is similar in producing either one, the reader’s experience is quite different. Both have their places in the learning process. And writing either one with an eye towards optimizing the user’s experience will always yield the most useful and even transformative results.

Citizens of the world should feel fortunate that the offbeat genius of Jon Damian was guided towards music and not, say, nuclear physics or politics. Otherwise, who knows what apocalypses might have resulted!

But music it is, and his second Berklee Press book The Chord Factory: Build Your Own Guitar Chord Dictionary, happily has come into print.

Sometimes, when I feel blue, I surf the Amazon reviews of books that I’ve edited. One set that never fails to cheer me up is for Jon’s first book, The Guitarist’s Guide to Composing and Improvising. I like how there is an early negative review, which is then followed by a raving horde of Jon Damian fanatics that basically say, “You are a twit, and you just don’t get how fricken’ brilliant this is.” Some direct quotes: “possibly the best book I’ve ever purchased regarding music,” and “This book is almost religious to me.”

There is indeed a cult of Jon Damian followers, who appreciate his eccentric approach to exploring music. His students have included legendary guitarists such as Mike Stern, Bill Frisell, and Wayne Kranz, who were kind enough to wax ecstatic in quotes on the Chord Factory back cover, alongside Jim Hall, and Allan Chase.

Do you remember the film, The Dead Poet’s Society, with Robin Williams playing a poetry teacher with an unusual approach to teaching? Much as I liked that flick, it fostered a breed of horrible teachers who leaned towards a fun and fluffy style that unfortunately found it permissible to sidestep the responsibility to teach real material.

This is different. Jon Damian’s novel teaching and theory comes out of a solid foundation in traditional musicianship, not just gratuitous fun. He has a unique ability to present advanced concepts of music theory in an entertaining—yet always practical—way. It is instruction for the thinking guitarist, straddling the precarious fence of traditional practical music-making to that elusive gray zone where Frank Zappa could dance to Arnold Schoenberg. Those two could have met at a Jon Damian Halloween party.

The Chord Factory is part meditation, part exploration, and sure, part light-hearted silliness. You can look at the study of music as learning both breadth and depth of music. In harmony, breadth would be memorizing a chart showing all the chord types and their accepted substitutions. That is the more common approach.

But Jon’s new book presents an unusually deep view into chords. Instead of just saying, “For C7, substitute a 9 for the 1 and practice this fingering until you memorize it,” Jon builds the chord types note by note, brick by brick. Play a note. Listen to it. Where does it lead? How is it useful? What does it express? Where else can you play it on the fingerboard? Next chapter, play each interval and ask the same questions. Then developing towards 3-note chords, 4-note chords, 5-notes chords, and so on. And along the way, indulge in digressions such as a get-rich-quick scheme based on common bird-watching practices, or Jon’s famous “CrossTones Puzzle”—which by somewhat miraculous intellectual Yoga stretches, Jon makes completely relevant to the harmonic concepts being explored.

It is a methodical, slow-motion look at harmony, gaining a uniquely intimate relationship with the components of the chords. You learn their possibilities, put them into context, and explore their relationship to other chords. This is the meditation. In the course of exploring a great variety of chord types, some unusual ones turn up and some old friends become new again. This is the exploration. And the process gives both rare depth and rare breadth, making harmony absolutely real, alive, practical, and expressive.

Jon’s writing is so full of life and his presentation style is so zany, that there is never a dull moment through this heady stuff. He has an imaginary friend, Chester, who asks questions, makes dumb jokes, and brings evidence in support of the discussion. This will endear some readers and baffle others, but it is actually a narrative practice that goes back thousands of years, to the Platonic dialogs, if not before (not to mention Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen). So, this is the most classical of teaching techniques.

Here’s Chester:

Is it for everyone? It is suited to any level and any genre of guitarist, from rock to jazz to avant garde. But a sense of humor and an adventurous musical spirit are absolute prerequisites.

Guitarists are a fairly unconventional lot, with the eccentrics perhaps closer to the center than at the fringe. Most would find that The Chord Factory expands their perception of what music can be. Or at least, gives them some useful new grips.