Really Funny reBlog

When you get the chance visit the blog of the young Bostonian trumpet player Jason Palmer.  I recently discovered both his playing and his blog.  Some great stuff on his blog and he is a monster player.  We’ll all be hearing a lot more from him in the coming years! http://jasonpalmerjazz.wordpress.com/

So I’m just gonna paste below a bit of what’s on his latest post – check out the full list (really worth your while) HERE.  I laughed out loud a bunch.  Reminded me of the jazz appreciation class I took at Penn.  Great teacher, some fellow jazz nerds in the class, but for the most part, those kids in the class had no idea at all.  Anyhoo, Jason’s post:

A friend of mine sent me a link to this site which contained these quotes from college students, reflecting on the jazz history class that they were enrolled in. Some of my friends think that this tread is fabricated, but I think that it’s too random to be. What do you all think? Here’s the thread:

These are quotes from students in a college jazz history class. They are extracted from the essay topic, “What I learned over this semester in jazz history.” These are all genuine responses, completely unaltered. They are all 18+ year old students; not high school or middle school age kids. None of them are music students; they all took this class as a gen. ed. credit and a hopeful “easy A”.

1. “Free Jazz is an era that I wished I had never learned about.?

2. “Free Jazz. Wow; what a sound it makes. An awful, horrible sound. I don’t see how that can actually be called a sound. My 5 year old nephew could pound on the piano and make the same sound! He may even make a better sound. To be honest, that sound is one big mess”.

3. “With swing, it’s kind of up in the air for me. I must say I tried like hell to keep up with it.”

4. “My favorite jazz has a bluesy, Mexican feel to it.”

5. “Though Jazz started in New Orleans, it traveled all around the world picking up and dropping off things along the way.”

6. “One thing that confused me was Jelly Roll Morton. Did he play with the Red Hot Chili Peppers? I didn’t think that they were around back then.?

7. “Jelly Roll (Morton) bridged the gap between piano and ragtime.

8. “My grandpa likes it, but I think scat stinks.”

9. “Chick Corea, Dizzie Gillespie, Bix Biderbeck, and the monk created the first cool group.”

10. “I wished Don Cherry would put his trumpet back in his pocket.”

11. “There is not enough space in my head to fit all that I learned.”

12. “This class taught me about a lot of things that I never knew about.”

13. “Some of the big jazz musicians we learned about were: Lous Armstrong, Duke, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Cillespic, T. Mark, Ken Barns, Buddy Baldwin, Jellyroll Mortin, Sydney Bichai, Fats Waller, Earl Hines, and many many more.”

14. “Coming into class on the first day, I assumed there would be a boring professor standing in front of the class droning on and on about jazz. Here’s where it started; this is who played it; and here we are today; blah, blah, blah. I now realize that my assumption wasn’t all that wrong.”

Check out the rest of the list:  http://jasonpalmerjazz.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/so-funny-i-had-to-repost/