That night, Russell Malone and George Benson came into the club to pay their respects. The music was awesome. And Ted had a thumb like Wes which was so warm and smooth. What a truly memorable night. I even had Ted conduct a guitar seminar for my Clinic Crafters Guitar Series which was very intense.

Along with those tunes, we would go over all the stuff in the “Concepts” book, the scale syllabus (in 3 octave long forms), harmonic ear-training, and I’m sure much more than I can even remember 20 years later.

I was very lucky to be chosen by Ted to sub for him teaching the Advanced Guitar class at Jazzmobile that year when he started getting busy doing gigs with Joe Williams. I asked him what he wanted me to teach them and he said “just do what we’ve been doing here.” Then in ’91 he called me up and said he wasn’t going to be doing Jazzmobile anymore and had given them my name. 20 years later I’m still teaching there, and while the “list” that we practice has changed somewhat over the years, the underlying principles of how we practice hasn’t. I still pull that list out every once in a while just to make sure I still know all those tunes.

BTW; I still have all those tapes of the lessons with Ted. I’ve been in the process of digitizing all my old cassettes and those are pretty high on the list. I’m guessing that you probably taped your lessons too?

Some years ago I read a book on networking that made a big impression. I think it was called “Never Eat Alone”. The author gave advice on networking that boiled down to this:

1. Contact people to see how you can help them, rather than to see how they can help you.
2. Contact people on a regular basis just to check up and see how they’re doing.
3. Try to connect your contacts with other contacts of yours so they can help each other.

It struck me that, if I had a contact who did all that, I would find them very useful and would want to keep in contact with them, as opposed to the people I’ve met who are blatantly networking and can’t wait to tell me how important they are. So I suppose the deeper rule is: “to network effectively, behave like a person that people would want to network with”.

James

Using technology can be looked at a lot like playing jazz. You can get all the chops you want, and use ‘em like gangbustas, but in the end, the more you rely on chops and technique alone, the less likely you are expressing who you really are. (Ok, perhaps not true 100% of the time, but a high percentage…)

Bleeding edge technology is the same way. Find subtle ways to use it to where your ideas come across clearly, and focus on it being “you.” That’ll be what brings the type of people that are really tuned into who you are and what you do. It’s still the content, not the presentation necessarily, that will bring bring peeps back in the long run. Too bad content is higher maintenance…

Granted, this approach is a bunch of idealistic mumbo jumbo, and from a pure, numbers based, marketing perspective may not be the best thing. I’ve never been good at numbers tho…

blatboy