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That ain't no 12 year old. That's a 42 year old little person. It's a scam.
Sounds like that kid has a real fire in his gut for jazz. What did he sacrifice to get there? That's the best question I've heard in weeks.
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05-04-2011 01:48 PM
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Perhaps we just have to accept that there is such a thing as genius. Granted some of the guitar greats have had to work to get there, but others are just preternaturally gifted people. The OP's question is one that researchers analyzing brilliance at a young age have pondered for a while, but it still remains mysterious. Right now there is a brilliant mathematician who is only 12 yrs old, solving problems that PhD's at MIT are grappling with. Sarah Chang was playing brilliant violin when she was 8 yrs old. Varedy is like the same thing, but in the jazz guitar world....
Last edited by aquinas; 05-04-2011 at 08:12 PM.
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I'm not sure I can accept that prodigies only can achieve this. To be born with perfect pitch and a great memory surely helps, but I think it's possible for people with average talent to be great players with the right approach along with the will to practice. Thoughts anyone?
I don't think it's cut and dry. I think that there are different levels of talent and different areas of talent. I think of it like sports. You have the best pros (all stars), you have guys that don't reach the pros but are still really good in the minors and you have guys who were great in college or high school sports but got no further. Also you see great athletes in one sport that can't play other sports too well. For example some guitar players are really good at playing a certain style but not good in another style. Let see a great jazz player try to rock out on some metal, it might not go so well.Last edited by Kman; 05-04-2011 at 02:20 PM.
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Besides Dennis Sandole there was Harry Leahey.
Vic Juris, Bob De Vos, Joshua Breakstone, Steve Trovato and countless others studied with Harry.
interestingly enough Harry studied with Johnny Smith and I think spent time with Dennis Sandole.
They both have great reputations in this neck of the woods. It's a shame that there aren't more recordings of them.
I heard a rumor about an album by Sandole but I haven't found it.
The internet has been great for bringing all kinds of local talent to the forefront. That and for having pissing contests with anyone that doesn't agree with you
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When I was in school taking engineering and programming classes there were students with a "knack," as it were, for grasping a concept in its entirety, or nearly so, while the rest of us slogged along using repetition and rote memory tactics to get through a difficult subject.
I've always thought that music is very similar. Sometimes the stars align just right and a person is lucky enough to find their talent and use it to max - a beautiful thing to behold.
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Jack Peterson, William Leavitt, Howard Roberts, Barry Galbraith, Mick Goodrick would seem to be some traditional heavies.
these are/were collegiate level instructors of course.
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no, he's concentrating plenty, even mouthing along with the solo. he's just not being a showboat, melodramatic facial contortionist. many players are calm when they play.
Originally Posted by monk
there are other youtube vids of him playing out there for all to see. he's playing octaves, funky licks, fast runs.... has his own CD released now. the kid's for real.
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I think at this point it really doesn't matter that he may be memorizing solos and spitting them back out. Unless he goes in the wrong direction or quits later on which I hope he doesn't do, he's going to improve and be one heck of an improviser. I'd love to hear what he sounds like at 42.
Now what do I mean by the wrong direction?
1. He discovers girls and puts the guitar down. I really don't see that happening given the magnetic power of the musician. (I may still be dreaming. Hey, where are the girls?)
2. His teacher leads him down the wrong path.
3. He goes into another profession which doesn't leave him time to play.
4. He gets into drugs.
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I just remembered something else. There was another video on YouTube I found about a year ago with a kid playing like Django Rheinhart. His name is Stochelo Rosenberg who alot of you know from the Rosenberg Trio. I went and looked him up on YouTube and listened to some improv he did recently. I was stunned by what he could do. I honestly think he puts Django away. Hopefully, this kid will turn out the same way.
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for whatever reason..the arts are where child prodigies surface the most..and can be accepted in a professional atmosphere...if they were in a sports context they could not be a pro...
the "how do they do it" is a bit biological/genetic/mystical..its like a childhood disease in reverse.."what did the kid do to deserve this..?" is not something you can plan or even manage...if you can play bach note for note at age 7...do you continue to develope and at age 30 you can play everything ever written by major composers..?
then the question of..can you play "outside" of what you can play...can you play showtunes...a dirty 12 bar blues...all with the same execution...and you bring degrees of emotion to work you never studied for years...
something that Einstine said..paraphrased..I did not discover my understanding of the universe by using my rational mind
play well
wolf
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Originally Posted by wolflen
Comparing art prodigies to sport prodigies is a little bit of a stretch, for example a 10 year old kid can have a perfect baseball swing, or a great aptitude for hockey, or long jump, what they don't have is the physical stature required to be pro. As much as I would like to believe that a 10 year old could hit a M. Rivera cutter, I don't think he possesses the physical strength to get the bat around quick enough, or with enough torque to do anything with it even if he did hit it.
The only sport I can think of where young people (still adults though) can flourish is race car driving, people like Louis Hamilton and Ayrton Senna are/were huge talents at young ages but still not at the F1 level though...
And being a young sports professional makes it easy to burn out and get hurt, if you strain your body too hard while it is growing you can do some serious damage.
I don't mean the next bit to be an attack on any talented young individual, but it has been my experience that people who are young, or 'prodigies' tend to get balanced out by individuals who put in the work latter in life. It is really impressive when a 10 year old can play at very advanced level, but when he or she plays like that 10 years from now, it is suddenly not that impressive. Once you can play extremly difficult music, where is there to go?
The learning/awesomeness curve has a limit, arbitrarily I'll name it Perfection. Trade 'e' for perfection.
Now, the green line represents perfection, which if you know any of the math behind the graph, you can never actually reach, you can come close, extremely close, but if you notice the slope of the curve at the beginning is much steeper than that of near the end. The young folks have just moved further up this curve earlier in their life. But as their peers become better, they will eventually get to the sameish place.
I know I'll never be as good as my heros. If you really think you will be someday, I think you are missing the point about making music, because you want to. Work hard enough, you might be able to make a living with music, but I think most people are grounded enough to realize that they are in it because they like it, and girls thinks its cool. The latter kind of goes out the window once you start getting serious about jazz though....
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Re Andreas Varady - I was lucky enough to see this young man accompanied by saxophonist Paul Booth Home
at the weekend and the music just flows out of him - I bought his cd which to me sounds as good as George Benson at 19 - even if you forget about the fact that its played by a 13 year old kid it sounds fantastic -
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I know plenty of cats in the majors who also fall into this category. Originally Posted by sc06yl
The rest of your analysis is interesting.
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Interesting conversation. Here's a couple things from cognitive science:
1) there has been a good amount of research on how people become experts. Most of the research is in the domain of chess expertise, because it lends itself to the type of empirical measurement that allows for generalization. Chess has a set of clear demarkations for expertise at various levels, from beginner to Grand Master, that makes it fairly easy to gauge an individual's progress. Interestingly, though time-on-task is very important (this is where the 10,000 hours to become an expert figure comes in), it is not the most important predictor of accomplishment. Instead, the more precise claim is that anyone can become a chess expert with 10,000 hours of "deliberative practice". Deliberative practice requires many of the ideas already mentioned in this thread. You need an expert teacher who tailors each step to the individual in a progression of constant difficulty, as suggested. However, the expert teacher needs to work from a known progression of steps toward expertise. That is, just any feedback won't do-- the teacher needs to understand exactly how you get to be an expert. These steps are fairly clear in the chess world (a series of game problems of escalating difficulty) and I imagine a thoughtful music teacher is capable of assembling a good series of steps. However, the idea is to always practice the next most difficult thing-- not to spend time on things already learned (e.g., playing scales you already know). Second, you need mindful reflection (e.g, analyzing a solo or a piece in your mind). In one set of studies, the most effective strategy for becoming a better chess player was to simply think about chess problems and chess moves. Players doing this did much, much better than players practicing by playing against others casually or in tournaments. Play didn't help as much as thinking. Third, you simply need to put in the time working on the correct things. There were no chess masters who hadn't put in tnes of thousands of hours. Don't forget, Chet Atkin practiced a minimum of 8 hours a day all the way up to the end!
The bottom line is that guided, deliberative practice with challenging material will move you most rapidly to higher levels. If you want to know more about expert learning and deliberative practice, search for the research of Anders Erickson.
2) Some people have mentioned language learning as an analog to music language learning. In recent years, developmental linguists have made some very interesting discoveries in this regard. Patricia Kuhl has shown that infants are able to hear phonemes from every language, but adults are not (adults can only hear phonemes from the languages they know). The brain comes attuned to all possibilities in the environment, but then selects the most salient ones to retain. This is why it is difficult, if not impossible, to hear certain phonemes when you are trying to learn a second language as an adult (and why foreign speakers have an accent). Your brain literally lacks to ability to hear that phoneme. There is a neural pruning event at about age 3 where a significant portion of neurons and synapses are lost. It is believed that this is the time that we lose the ability to hear certain phonemes. During the first three years, your brain is keeping a frequency count of sensations and the associations among sensations. At the pruning event, your brain gets rid of anything that hasn't been used and retains the useful parts. If you want your kid to be verbally adept, talk to them alot (and not in baby goo-goo language). If you want your kid to be multilingual, start them on additional languages while they are still able to hear them.
Does this apply to music? I don't know of similar research with music and didn't look. However, your brain is essentially a powerful pattern recognition machine. This suggests that frequent exposure to music at a young age prepares the brain better for subsequent music learning. We could hypothesize that perfect pitch could be taught by repetitively exposing infants to tones and the names of those tones. The brain would learn the associative pattern while it is most plastic (able to learn).
We also know that your brain is plastic throughout the lifespan. This means, its never to late to learn. However, your ability to learn is compromised by the loss of neurons that may be important for facilitating that learning. In other words, its easier for a baby to learn German than for an adult to learn because the baby's brain has all the tools necessary for German learning and the adult brain has lost some of its ability.
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Very interesting. Cheers.
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I agree; this guy did not have a teacher other than his dad who he copied. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
I know guys who know him (he is based in Ireland); he learned to play by listening to records and copying them and by busking with the family. I first came across him from a friend who said he had seen this family busking on the streets of Cork and said that there was this kid who played amazing jazz.
He did not have any lessons as such; he "simply" spent hours a day all through his childhood developing his chops and ears.
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There's actually been an article about him in Guitar Player magazine. Worth looking at- the kid apparently LOVES George Benson.
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Originally Posted by princeplanet
Each of us has to strive for our personal best. I progressed much faster when I was taking the ABRSM exams for classicalguitar (Associated Board Royal Schools of Music, UK-based but I took tests inNew Jersey). I got to grade 4 then other things took over my focus. I continuedon with weekly lessons with a CG teacher but never was able to come close to myprogress during the ABRSM period. I think prepping for practical tests creates motivation and therefore progress.
The only plectrum guitar course with exams is given by Trinity College ofMusic, UK. Not sure if it is Jazz oriented and if they test in the U.S..
Doesn't Berklee have online lessons that require testing/performing?
Ed S
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I saw an interview on Irish TV where he said he heard Benson on a record when he was 5 or 6 (when Andreas was 5 or 6) and decided that was what he wanted to sound like. Originally Posted by Shadow of the Sun
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Well, you get "levels" in Berklee as a student. I believe it's 1-8 in a few different categories (reading, improvisation, etc.) Originally Posted by edspyhill01
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I'm pretty sure at that age was still in the attic playing electric football. Originally Posted by Dazz
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I'm going to sign up for the online Guitar Chords 101 course and proceed through Guitar Scale 101 then Jazz Guitar 101. Originally Posted by JakeAcci
Thanks for the reply.
Ed S.
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I was speaking about the actual college - I don't know anything about the online courses. Good luck!
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Me too! But see, it lead us to jazz - as soon as you flip the switch on Electric Football, all the "players" do a pretty good imitation of Thelonious Monk doing his dance.... Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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