Practicing

A taste of the Ukrainian spirit
A buyer of my book Alto Trombone Savvy wrote me a very sweet email and informed me that he cannot directly receive the book

Practice this way to improve your skills quicker – Part 2
Don’t read this until you’ve looked through part 1. In Part 1, I used a piano lesson as an example of discovering the

Practice this way to improve your skills quicker – Part 1
I gave a lesson this week to a piano player who wants to play jazz better. From our interaction, I was reminded

Resolving a musical tug of war
I received an email the other day from a jazz player trying to know how best he should be practicing. I want

Uplift your playing: try something new
Thank you for all the positive comments and emails from last week’s post on building your health. As I thought about all those

Three tips for hearing your playing better
I played with a rehearsal band last week. Something happened during the obligatory tuning process that gave me a thought about a

How best to use my book, Rhythm Savvy
I received an email the other day from a buyer of my book, Rhythm Savvy. His good question asked how best to

Michael Lake
Jazz/latin trombone, author, multimedia artist, marketer

Why is jazz taking a back seat to band in school?
As I frequently do, I was searching yesterday for high school jazz band directors with whom I can share some of the jazz educational resources

A conversation about jazz with an Artificial Intelligence
As artificial intelligence is creeping into so many applications these days, I thought I’d share what it “thinks” about jazz and improvisation. To do that,

A taste of the Ukrainian spirit
A buyer of my book Alto Trombone Savvy wrote me a very sweet email and informed me that he cannot directly receive the book but is making