Very hip school. Beautiful campus. Terribly worn-down facilities. The jazz department is crammed into a small corner of what looks like a cathedral. The undergrad department is still fairly new so they only have a handful of undergrads, which means most of their jazzers are killer grad students. I don't think I impressed anyone with my playing, but everyone was very cool. John Gunderson the sax guy seemed fairly impressed by my teaching, maybe because he's so new to teaching and frankly isn't much of an educator yet, although he's a killer player and very personable. I went to his advanced jazz theory class and it was hilarious. We spent 15 minutes going over a graphic analysis of a Bjork (That's right, Bjork) song that he did. It was a piece of paper that read from left to right, full of all these symbols he came up with to represent the different sounds. "So right here there's this pointalistic texture going on, so I drew a bunch of dots, and this jagged line is for that jagged electronic thing going on right there." And he doesn't really break things down because I don't think he thinks that way (the exact opposite of Dr. Watkins). He just throws stuff out there and then sits there like he doesn't know what else to say, and people might take the opportunity to comment, or they might not. "So man, check out those first three chords..." (long silence). Or, "So I think if I wrote a tune like this where the melodic phrases didn't line up with the harmonic phrases and they were all odd lengths, that'd be pretty cool..." (long silence). One of the students gave me a tour of the campus which was really nice of him. Overall it was a positive experience and it's motivated me to start practicing my butt off again because ever since I started teaching my practicing has been going down hill.
Crud I gotta go teach a lesson. Anyway, I kind of don't think I'm going to get accepted there. But we'll see. I might not get into either one of my programs, in which case I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Keep teaching here? Move to Boise? Move to Salt Lake? We'll see.
I need to call you again, but I got the rundown from Ma on your audition too. You never know, I didn't think I 'd get in anywhere either, but I got into all three of my programs. I even saw my professor's notes about my audition later--he wrote something like, "technique iffy." But he still took me and gave me full financial aid, and it's a decent school. So your audition depends on more than just getting all the notes out.
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