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[October 10, 2011 - Fairfax, CA]
How Jazz Led Me to Here Some of you know that I’ve had a pretty really long career in the advertising / marketing / design world. It’s one ways I’ve supported myself as a self-employed artist since for more than two decades. Most people don't know that I've never had any formal training in any of it. At all. I've never had any training in visual art, either. Everything I learned by doing, watching others who are better, and practicing. Kind of like music.
My career began accidentally, when during a jazz piano lesson with my mentor, Alan Swain. Alan authored many jazz theory books and was the go-to guy if you wanted jazz chops. I moved to Chicago and applied to the music conservatory where he taught specifically to study with him.
One day, we were puzzling through some kind of chord-building exercise in one of his books that I didn’t get when I was practicing on my own. He played it for me and it made sense. (Visual learner!)
Without thinking, I offered, “Why don’t you write it like this”…and scribbled my notes right in the book. Kind of sacrilegious now that I think about it.
He looked at me. Silence. Uh oh. I really just overstepped, I thought. He’s going to kick me out of his studio.
Without emotion he said, “You’re hired”.
For the next seven years, I edited and formatted Alan’s chicken scratch pencil notations into legible manuscripts. He loved to golf, and would go away from the city to play golf and write, returning with a pile of nearly illegible notes cut and pasted by hand, making the digital files impossible to follow with any ease.
A digital nomad even then, I happily worked on a Mac SE30 (pretty portable) on Photoshop 1.0 and some kind of archaic music notation software. My self-taught career as an, editor, copywriter, designer, and eventually a creative director, began.
Which was great. Because while I initially dreamed of being a jazz pianist, that wasn’t really my true calling.
More on the true calling and the power of apprenticeship coming up…
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Who? / What? / Why?
If you landed here from a link or something and are wondering what The Blank Slate is all about - the story begins here. You can learn more about Lisa Sonora Beam, the author, here.
Thank you and enjoy.
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