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I recently attended a Joey Alexander concert at SFJazz and was amazed how mature his playing is at his current age, given my standard of 'good musician' is rath

I recently attended a Joey Alexander concert at SFJazz and was amazed how mature his playing is at his current age, given my standard of 'good musician' is rather high as a professionally trained jazz musician myself. He started playing jazz at age of 6 and started performing professionally when he was 9. I agree that people need SOME time to learn the ropes but with proper training, 2 years is enough to be good. Note that proper training doesn't mean practicing certain technique, scale or etude hundreds of times. Nowadays there are systems designed over the years by schools such as Berklee effective enough to make someone a good jazz musician within 2 years, similar to many athlete training systems. No system can make legends, but decent musicians for sure.

yesenadam 9y ago
Nice to at last read someone making sense on this page. :-) Ok, but 1 child prodigy learning in 3 years (?) hardly disproves my point. Also, I don't believe in "proper training". I believe in learning from the recordings of the greats, and from playing music with people. Sounds like that's how Joey Alexander learnt[0]. I believe that, like many things, jazz can be learnt but not taught. Someone trained in some system will sound like the music equivalent of the academic artist - expert at following someone else's rules, but nowhere as an artist. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Alexander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Alexander edit: Most people who go to Berklee are already pretty good when they get there, aren't they? Hardly starting from scratch.