Day 6 - Clinic at Apple Guitars, Pine Farm performance

Today we were scheduled to have a rhythm section clinic at Apple guitars. Apple guitars is a very famous guitar shop run by Berklee Alumni Masato Shinohara. Although it was called a rhythm section clinic, it turned into more of a jazz workshop. We had two vocalists, two pianists, a tenor saxophonist, and two bassists come to the workshop to hear feedback from us Berklee students about their playing and learn new techniques to better improve their jazz understanding. We started by performing the jazz standard "All of Me" and then listened to them play the tune directly after us. Most of them had experience performing jazz in the past, and were familiar with Berklee College of Music, so we had a lot of common ground to work with. After listening to them perform we gave each of them individually constructive criticism, certain things to work on or to be aware of when practicing and performing in this setting. After, we had them play a ballad, "Misty" with a vocalist who was familiar with the tune, which exposed more areas of improvement in the musicians that we then addressed. We discussed the importance of embellishing the melody, and then demonstrated some reharmonization techniques, and extended ending techniques that they could use with jazz ballads. The students were very enthusiastic, and had many questions about concepts they could work on and how to improve their sound. We shared with them that the most important thing is to listen to the masters of jazz, and to learn to play what they were hearing! They were curious about what it was like studying at Berklee, and we were happy to share our experience!

After our clinic at Apple guitars, we had a performance at Pine Farm in Osaka, a small jazz club owned by a jazz enthusiast. He had an old Kawai piano, and a stage Rhodes piano! We only had a couple people at this concert, so we thought of it more as a rehearsal, but the band was sounding really amazing together, and we all thoroughly enjoyed the concert!