I recently watched Master Series — Antonio Sanchez. This is a great DVD from Hudson Music. One important concept Antonio talks about is learning the “language” of any musical genre. He said that he had worked on and had developed pretty good technique, but he found that he wasn’t able to speak fluently in jazz, e.g. He went about trying to fix this by listening to and transcribing the masters, and by adjusting his drum set (getting rid of the bigger drums and double BD pedal). I have always maintained that to play any style of music I have to listen to it and play along with it to try to absorb it.
Throughout the DVD he plays along with some fun tracks and talks about some really great stuff. Near the end, he stresses how important it is to be professional and gives his thoughts on that: return phone calls and emails; show up on time; have a humble attitude; be a people-person. In particular, he says you don’t have to be the best player out there, but if you were easy to get along with during the tour that you will get called back. Personally, I always want to get called back.
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