Books
Celebrating One Hundred Years of Bird free ebook
I recorded a conversation yesterday with Richie Beirach and published the result into an eBook paying tribute to Charlie Parker. After all, Bird’s 100th birthday was very recent
What made Miles Davis a great band leader?
Dave Liebman and I are finishing a book called The Art of Skill. The book contains Dave’s advice on becoming a better jazz player, biographical reflections, and thoughts on how one goes about finding their own unique musical voice.
New thinking about books
Richie Beirach and I published our first soft cover book last week titled A Framework for Jazz Mastery. In that first week we sold far more than we anticipated. Thank you! We used some new technologies to communicate about the book using marketing platforms and techniques unique to promoting books about jazz.
Getting the most out of Trombone Improvisation Savvy
I got an email recently from an owner of Improvisation Savvy who wrote that he isn’t getting what he had hoped he

Michael Lake
Jazz/latin trombone, author, multimedia artist, marketer
The skill of simplicity
I’ve received a couple of emails this past week making basically the same point about Pocket Jazz that I thought was worth sharing and exploring.
Does popularity define an artist?
A comment was recently written in one of the Pocket Jazz lessons. It was a lengthy comment but it ended with these questions: When is

It’s all about your time
A LOT of you have taken advantage of my offer to sign up for Pocket Jazz for free. Some have come back asking when they