Inga Eichler's scholarship at Tech Music School Part 6

This terms exams certainly were on a much higher level than the first term exams. The material covered is much more and moves at a much faster pace. Especially Chart Reading and Sight Reading which are probably my weakest subjects but I hope I did well in all of my exams. As always we were all pretty relieved for everything to be over which was a very good reason to party. Loads of the people that go to tech live close by as well so there’s always a house party going on somewhere, it´s a big community of musicians.

After the exams we had a week off, then one week of lessons and then our two week Easter holiday. Most people went home during this time but I stayed in London because I had some friends from Germany coming over to visit me. Also I had rehearsals and a few gigs lined up and with work as well I thought I might as well stay here. Now, two weeks into term 3 I do miss home and my family a bit but I´m going to get to see them in the summer. Before the Easter break I went to the Freshers night for the new April intake. As always it was a great night with loads of teacher bands playing, nice people and cheap beer. With the new April Diploma people it feels like there’s a fresh wind blowing through Tech and I get reminded of my first weeks at Tech. I was asking questions to anyone I met about the course and know I find myself in the position of answering them for the “new guys”. It also makes me realise that my time at Tech Music Schools is nearly over and although time flew very quickly I feel like a different person than 10 months ago. Not only that my skills, knowledge and experience have increased so much, I also find that I learned an awful lot about myself. Being a musician, what you do is so closely connected to who you are, there´s no way around getting to terms with yourself. It´s not just that, making music with all these people also teaches you a lot about how to work in a team. Being in a Band can be so difficult with all the different tastes, influences and opinions everyone has. Nevertheless you have to achieve some kind of productiveness around that and still be able to get along on a human basis.

The course is going in a very different direction now because its all about jazz. That implies a whole new approach because so far we have only played covers in the Live Performance Workshops, trying to sound as close to the recording as possible. Now it’s more about how we play our own version of the song whilst still trying to stay inside the jazz idiom. I also noticed that most people think that jazz is “hard” and “difficult” but I think that is just because jazz is not part of most peoples day to day life. We are not used to listening to jazz, you rarely hear it on the radio or in advertisements and although loads of popular music genre derive from jazz there’s still unfamiliar chord changes and chord types within jazz. Due to the fact that my dad is a jazz pianist, jazz has always been a part of my life and as I grew up with my dads saying of “everything is jazz” I never really differentiated it from other music. As I grew older I probably did, but still Jazz has never been unfamiliar and scary to me, but has always just been the music that my dad plays. Of course I can see that the unfamiliar might seem scary but you can easily make it familiar. I think that’s what Tech does in a very smooth and gentle way. Making people familiar with jazz.

As we head towards the end of the course everyone is thinking and discussing the future. Most people want to go on to do the Degree at Tech, others are not yet sure. Some people like me think it´s best to take work for a year, get some experience “out there” and hopefully save up some money. During the next year I´m hopefully going to make a decision about that. Also, I´m hoping to make some money with my Covers Band, playing pubs, functions and weddings. At the moment we still don’t gig as much as we were hoping to. Things go very slowly in the beginning because it takes time to get known and trusted by all the agencies and make yourself a name. Hopefully its going to get moving soon. Playing covers is definitely not what I want to do for the rest of my life but I´d like to at least try it. Apart from that I also play in a really cool funk-originals Band with other people from Tech. We have a few gigs lined up over the next month and I really enjoy playing with them because I get to be creative with other very inspiring musicians.

That’s it for this month, I might come up with a fancy interview again next month.
Here are the facebook links to my Bands:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Karate-Water/113840895301520?ref=mf
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/FOXY/60815736618?ref=ts