Oscar Peterson (1925-2007) was truly one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, and the first jazz star that Canada could truly call its own! In 2021, Historica Canada featured Peterson in a new Heritage Minute. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cdXEhR9dd4 Oscar Peterson was called the “Maharaja of the keyboard” by Duke Ellington, and “the man [...]
Percussion Fun! Everybody loves to make some noise. One year, just to see what would happen, I put a conga in the hallway leading to the classrooms. I wanted to see if anyone could walk by and not give it a tap. The results … maybe on the second pass. The ability to keep a [...]
Stringed Instruments You May Not Know One of the things we like to impress upon our students, is that once you have learned to play one instrument in a family, such as the strings, you can apply that knowledge to learning how to play any other similar instrument. Although I started with the guitar, I [...]
Instruments that are Played in Unusual Ways Part of teaching our students about music is to introduce them to a wide variety of instruments, no matter what they are studying. We do, of course, cover the instruments of the orchestra, and the unusual instruments in various compositions, such the glass harmonica in the Carnival of [...]
Reed Instruments When we think about reed instruments, we usually consider the most common ones … the sax, the clarinet, the oboe, all of which use cane reeds. But there are some, more unusual, instruments that use metal reeds such as the accordion, the concertina and the harmonica, not to mention the bagpipes and the [...]