Blog Assignment: Dave Valentin

I have chosen Dave Valentin who is a 57 year old male flutist, born in New York City. He began playing the bongos and congas before he was 10 and was playing in Latin Clubs by the age of 12. After studying percussion in the High School of Music and Arts, he later converted over to Flute and began to take private lessons with jazz flutist Hubert Laws.

He soon began playing as a professional flutist in Latin bands and created many new techniques. He created a way of blowing into the flute to make it sound like percussion, singing into a flute, and using non-standard flutes such as the bass flute, etc. He applies these techniques to many genres of music, including jazz, R&B, salsa and merengue ( a style of music from the Dominican Republic/ Latin America.) He released his debut album in 1977 with Ricardo Marrero, and won a Grammy nomination in 1985.

The song he is playing is called Obsesion. What I like about this performance is all the unique sounds he can make with his flute, and yet he has a very clear and beautiful sound. He also sways to the beat of the song, showing that he's into it. He has an amazing sense of rhythm, his improvising sounds rehearsed it's so good. And he has to improvise for over 5 minutes, improvising for over 2 choruses/verses is hard enough.

Click to enjoy the stylings of Dave Valentin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ffWLC6ZTro&feature=quicklist

20 minutes May 6th

I decided to work on band pieces and a study from the red book.

I worked on sections 93 - 101, and 125 - 138 in the Carmina Burana. I find the second section harder because its 16th notes at a very high tempo. I used repitition to improve this section, it is not quite up to speed but it's better than what I could do before.

I then worked on Chillers and Thrillers. from 19 - 55. The random flats in the second half of this section throw me through a loop, so I decided I would concentrate on this section. I used repition and can now play the flats and naturals fairly well with the correct speed. I then worked on "Them from Dracula" because of all the high notes and the speed at which they are played. I used repition again, but I can play this section better. And I looked at "The Face of Voldemort" because I like it.

And last but not least I practed Study no. 9. I found that halfway through the song my rhythms got messed up, so I practiced those bars more than others (bars

Over the Weekend

I'm not sure if this counts...but over the weekend a bunch of friends and I got together and decided to play old pieces from Jazz class. We spent just over an hour and half on them, telling each other how we could improve on them. We learned that we're a little rusty with improv, we were all thinking of taking jazz next year so that's why we decided to bring them out.

We brought out a timer, and we went over the pieces a few times and tried to improve our playing. So I don't know if this counts, but I decided to post it anyways :D