I just came back from a jazz festival at Katy High School in Texas that show-cased student stage bands from ten schools mostly near Houston, but some as far away as Beaumont and Brownsville (the latter band stole the show). The festival was also a teaching event, with each band or ensemble...

Neil McLachlan says he wants to do for music what Apple did for the personal computer. For over two decades, the scientist, artist and university professor has worked to increase music participation. “Only five per cent of people (in the West) who go through tertiary music education end up...

At 13, an age when most boys want to learn the guitar, Gary Marcus, decided he wanted to be a scientist. Twenty-five years later he had become one of the country’s best known cognitive psychologists, with major papers and three general-interest books on the workings of the human mind and a...

And How You Can Use It to Your Advantage Music can often make or break a day. It can change your mood, amp you up for exercise, and help you recover from injury. But how does it work exactly, and how can you use it to your advantage? Recently, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords used music...

John Covach’s December 29th column in The Plain Dealer, “Why no Yes in the Rock Hall?” offers a provocative view on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction process.  Covach correctly pointed out that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has not yet inducted many prog rockers. Only Genesis...

What’s the Big Idea? When we think of classical music, we tend to think dead white men in wigs. One under-discussed legacy of the Boomers is that for every generation since the Summer of Love, going to a concert means standing around in a bar and having lukewarm beer spilled on your shoes...

Birthdays, Album & DVD Releases, Freddie For A Day & a Doodle!   September 5th 2011… Five For The 5th! 1. Freddie Mercury’s 65th Birthday! 2. The release of the final five albums in Queen’s re-issue series! 3. Live At Wembley Stadium DVD: 25th Anniversary Edition...

Dream Theater are just several weeks shy of starting a massive world tour in support of their new album, A Dramatic Turn Of Events, but the band’s keyboard master, Jordan Rudess, is still buzzing about their recently completed European festival dates – the group’s first with...

“Thick as a Brick” Played in Special 2012 Tour and AQUALUNG-Special Edition in October   Ian Anderson performs Thick As A Brick in its entirety for the first time since 1972, going out for a world tour commencing in Great Britain in Mid-April. Then, it’s on to European...

Adrian Kreye, an Editor, The Feuilleton (Arts and Essays), of the German Daily Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich points out that free jazz is a perfect way to improve our cognitive toolkits. It’s always worth to take a few cues from mid-20th-century avant-garde. It is a highly...

The disk drives powering Dropbox, Amazon’s Cloud Drive, and Google Music likely issued a small sigh of relief Monday, after a federal court judge found that the MP3tunes cloud music service didn’t violate copyright laws when it used only a single copy of a MP3 on its servers, rather than...

Older people often have difficulty understanding conversation in a crowd. Like everything else, our hearing deteriorates as we age. There are physiological reasons for this decline: We lose tiny hair cells that pave the way for sound to reach our brains. We lose needed neurons and chemicals in...

Since their release in 1978, hit albums like Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” Billy Joel’s “52nd Street,” the Doobie Brothers’ “Minute by Minute,” Kenny Rogers’s “Gambler” and Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” have generated tens of...

On Dream Theater’s highly anticipated upcoming album, A Dramatic Turn Of Events, the undisputed kings of modern-day prog rock emerge from what might have been a career-threatening blow – the loss of drummer and founding member Mike Portnoy – better, stronger and more daring...

Google has launched an online music magazine, Google Magnifier, that will let beta users of its Google Music service find new songs and free tracks. Users of the company’s beta music site will be able to add daily recommended tracks to their online libraries for free, Google said in a blog...

As one of the definitive rock icons of our age, the late great QUEEN frontman Freddie Mercury’s extraordinary talents and influence are still felt in the entertainment world to this day, an unreal 20 years after his sad and untimely death. Only months ago rock fans voted him the Greatest...

One day in 2009, Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University graduate student, opened his mail to discover a fine for $675,000. That was the sum total in damages the record industry reckoned he owed them for sharing 30 songs on the peer-to-peer website Kazaa. The amount was eventually reduced to...

Teaching kids how to sing used to be part of a school’s comprehensive visual and performing arts program. Sometimes schools hired a dedicated chorus teacher, but usually, the music teacher taught kids how to sing. Nowadays, thanks to budget cuts, it’s pretty rare to find an...

Chances are that by now you’ve been caught up with everything going on with Dream Theater. This past week, the band debuted The Spirit Carries On, which chronicles the audition process behind the band’s search for drummer Mike Portnoy’s replacement. While we certainly felt teased and...

The “acoustic laptops” are wood boxes with various tiny objects attached; springs, stones, metal, rubber, string, needles, memorabilia – amplified by cheap contact mikes (piezos). I use the acoustic laptop first and foremost as a musical instrument in which I have framed...