Joel's jazz music samples
Bill and Joel's duo samples

Ranked by All About Jazz as “on a par with seminal players like Bill Frisell and Ben Monder," Joel has performed with such New York jazz luminaries as Dave Binney, Donny McCaslin, Matt Shulman, D.D. Jackson, Jason Lindner, and Dan Weiss. He has traveled in the States and Canada extensively with his own group, the Joel Newton Situation, and others’, including regular performance and school workshop tours with collaborator and world-renowned jazz violinist, Christian Howes.

Growing up on Long Island, Joel began folk and classical guitar lessons at age 7, then shifted gears in high school and started emulating the standard rock icons of the 70's and 80's. After hearing Jeff Beck and Pat Metheny, Joel began a slow trajectory toward jazz, which strengthened through independent ensemble experience at Dartmouth College (where he graduated with a philosophy degree and decided last-minute not to attend medical school), and culminated in a degree from William Paterson College in Jazz Performance. Since then, Joel has been returning to his rock, blues, classical, folk, and fusion roots and mixing them all up with jazz and avant-garde every way he can.

Joel has also been a part of a host of pop/singer-songwriter projects and has done extensive studio work with producer Harvey Goldberg (sound producer for Late Night with David Letterman). He has worked creatively with small theater productions, including performing in and contributing to the score of the musical "Mankynde," which debuted at the 2005 NYC Fringe Festival.

Joel has released two recordings, “ONE” in 2000 and “Crying and Laughing” in 2005. He is currently completing a record with violinist Howes. Please visit www.joelnewton.com for more information.

About Bill Cochran
Bill, a resident of Kingston, NY, currently plays principal horn in the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra and other chamber ensembles in the Hudson Valley. In addition teaching horn privately, he has coached the winds and brass of the Bard College orchestra. Born to a horn-playing dad and raised on Long Island, Bill completed his Masters at The College Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati.  He has played professionally in the Ohio Chamber Orchestra, Cleveland Ballet and Opera Orchestras, the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra and the Dayton and Toledo Symphonies. His main teachers have been William Purvis and Lowell Greer, and more recently he has studied jazz with Tom Varner. 

For the last eight years, Bill’s passion has been a jazz-inspired personal take on improvised music that integrates his classical experience with jazz and other genres (along with electronic enhancement) into a style that he calls “epic ambient.” This musical reawakening has turned him into a champion of the creative spirit, urging improvisation in day-to-day practice and performance as a means to unleash the inventive passion all musicians possess. Bill has devised and teaches systems for using improvisation in warm-up routines and daily technical development. After years of practicing merely as a means to an end, he has learned how to make creative practice a daily experience of the passion we seek in music.

References available upon request

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Motivating Kids Through Music Improvisation
How Creativity Can Keep Kids Practicing

What’s the big deal about improvising?
Improvising is, at heart, making one’s own music—just making it up. Like a kid playing ‘make-believe’ with friends or imagining fictional things and places in his head. Or like taking a piece of paper and, without much thinking, starting to draw a picture, a scene, telling a story with the things on the page. Or writing a story. With all these activities, kids are making things up that are THEIR stories, THEIR ideas. And they’re doing so in the moment, easily, instinctively, joyfully, as quickly as the ideas come to them.

The same works with music (only with music, what’s made up isn’t pretend, it’s real). Kids don’t have to just read notes someone else wrote, or memorize other peoples’ songs. They can choose their own notes, invent their own music. They can just make it up as they go along, as they do when they draw. They can create.

Why should improvisation be encouraged at an early age?
Kids are natural inventors with near-endless creative capacity, and thus they should be encouraged to play with music. We believe this is the best foundation for a rich future in music. Practicing doesn’t have to feel like work—at least not all the time—a lot of it can and even HAS to feel like play. If kids don’t include the concept of ‘play’ in their daily playing, they 1) won’t want to practice as much, and 2) won’t gain the essential love of music that comes from seeing it not as a set of rules, but rather as a pursuit of adventure, beauty and joy. And if kids practice for years out of love for the music, just think of what they can contribute with the passion, dedication and spirit of invention that flourishes in them.

Why is exploration in visual art encouraged at an early age—with generous refrigerator exhibition space—but not as much with music? Rarely is a kid chastised for drawing freely and not doing his ‘art homework.’ Why don’t we clap, laugh, and rejoice when our kids sit at the piano and create the sound equivalent of a crude stick figure, an abstraction of colors, or a fantastical scene from their imagination? What about imitating birds sounds with a flute or guitar? With drawing, is there no connection between this innocent, improvised ‘play’ art and later development into ‘mature’ art? Do kids not gain invaluable skills and confidence through adventurous self-discovery while drawing? Is there any reason music should be different?

Some might caution that kids can’t be productive in music without formal guidelines. Like training wheels, musical “rules” and boundaries, such as chord/scale relationships, can be applied at the appropriate time to help provide shape and structure. But rules are only temporary guides, suggestions, catalysts—they are not part of the essence of improvisation, and too-strict adherence to rules can stifle inventiveness. With young kids especially, our primary mission  should be to allow them to be themselves, experiment with music, and have as much fun as they can with it—just like with drawing. There’s plenty of time for rules later.

Creativity in music is a way for people to tell the world who they are, a way to express their individuality. Music isn’t a set of rules. Music is a form of expression, a form of freedom.

Who can improvise?
Everyone can. Creative freedom and ability aren’t just for the Beethovens and Bachs of the world; they’re for every musician, for every person. If someone can doodle, whistle a made-up little ditty, or spin a 30-second story to make friends laugh, that person can improvise.

Lots of kids don’t think they can improvise. Perhaps because they’re in orchestra and not jazz band, or because they aren’t encouraged creatively by their teachers, they think they are a different kind of musician and their job is just to read music. This is not true. Sure, not all kids will ultimately make improvisation as central to their music as others—some will find the joys and challenges of interpreting the notes of others perfectly adequate. But even classical players will benefit from improvisation; after all, so much early classical music was improvised, and students can use their creative pursuits to boost their appreciation for the music. They might see it as moving beyond the role of servant and beginning to own the music, creating and sculpting it with skills and status generally attributed only to the masters. We want all kids to be encouraged to discover what they can bring to the music through the creative powers they possess; we’re convinced that the result will be more, better and happier musicians.

How can people learn to improvise?
It’s easy. They only have to pick up their instruments, let go of any doubt or nervousness, open up their ears and imagination, and start expressing themselves. Just play, listen, and keep playing. Play along with recordings. Play with friends. Play alone. Fear of “mistakes” must be shed; mistakes can’t be avoided in the art of creation and invention. Mistakes can lead to new discoveries. The whole idea of mistakes presupposes the dominance of rules, which misses the point. Ultimately, the arbiter of “correctness” in improvisation is the player’s ears; if the player is really listening and finding the notes he or she deep down feels and hears as right, then they are right. For this reason, learning to be intimately attuned to one’s sound is critical, and we show kids how to “think with their ears” and learn to see their instruments as extensions of what they hear, as mere tools to render the inner source of their music. Nothing in music is more valuable than a strong ear.

Think of what we’d missing if kids were afraid to start a drawing because they didn’t know how to draw a mountain; fearlessly, they start drawing, and either slowly learn how to draw a mountain “correctly,” or perhaps even better, discover some original, abstract way of drawing a mountain—a way they might not discover if they subjugated their instincts to rules.

Clinic Description

We have programs for kids of all backgrounds and skill levels, designed to give them the confidence and understanding necessary to expand their musical creativity. With a strong emphasis on interactive playing, we start with the most basic exercises (e.g., improvising with nothing more than a single technique or variable, such as breath, bow-strokes, dynamics, or tempo) and proceed through a variety of technical and conceptual contexts (some outlined on page 1 of this brochure). We show kids how improvising is first and foremost a fun, creative, instinctive act of allowing themselves to take a chance, put on their inventor caps, and try something new. Kids will be delighted as they hear themselves and their peers assuming a new attitude toward their instruments and begin to produce music they didn’t think they were capable of.

With slightly older and more advanced students we add “rules” to the mix: scales, arpeggios, chords, rhythmic complexity, and other structures, and demonstrate interactively how they can put these tools to use in their improvisations. By example and in-depth student participation, we show how it’s easy and intuitive to use these structures; theory doesn’t have to be seen as an intimidating, mysterious mountain of information. Instead we show how to break this information down into categories that can be prioritized and reduced to simple, ready-to-use tools—tools that will support creativity without smothering it in rules. Slow, patient, ear-oriented, highly-targeted practice is encouraged as a way to maximize progress and confidence and minimize the fear factor.

Ear-training is presented early on as a fun, easy and powerful way for kids to become masters of what they hear—identifying intervals and other structures by ear in a way that will help them get those sounds out through their instruments. We believe the “ear” is by far the most important of a musician’s assets.

With jazz band students, we offer group and individual-level coaching, providing instruction and feedback in all areas of individual and ensemble playing, including improvisation, groove, rhythmic feel, listening, tone, and dynamics.

In addition to (and as part of) our strictly educational programs, we offer duo performances and can tailor them to the students’ and school’s needs—everything from quick demonstrations to full-length assembly or classroom formats.

Joel's jazz music samples
Bill and Joel's duo samples