A Movie on Miles Davis

Don Cheadle

So it is no longer a rumor, Oscar Winner Don Cheadle will feature Miles Davis in a movie on the life of the great trumpet player. The actor who performed in Ocean's Eleven and Hotel Rwanda wll also direct the film.

Free Mp3s

Here are a few sites where you can download free legal music

http://music.download.com
http://www.mp3.com
http://www.garageband.com
http://www.epitonic.com
http://mp3.washingtonpost.com
http://www.iuma.com
http://www.peoplesound.com

Back to writing music

A very interesting article on Guardian about writing music, an art that many musicians are forgetting.

Writing and performing music once went hand in hand. If we want to be better musicians, we need to revive the lost art of composition

Jacob Lateiner, the great American pianist and teacher, used to tell his students that they should write music every day. If not their own, then they should copy out someone else's. He felt that the physical act of a hand guiding a scratching pencil across paper was a vital part of a person's musical life, and that it would naturally lead to their fingers depressing the keys with more intelligence and care.

By the end of the second world war, with a few exceptions, composers no longer played their own instrumental compositions, and few instrumentalists wrote. The ideal of specialisation, with its closed shop and the resulting displacement between creator and performer, had become the norm.

Read the whole article by Stephen Hough on Guardian Unlimited

Jazztube

YouTube is a gold mine to see historical jazz videos, the problem is that often they're difficult to find. But now there's Jazztube!