Teaching My Outer Child to Play

Yesterday I bought two Bastien Method piano books for my son. At the Jazz School gig, I asked Mary Fettig how she had gotten her sons so interested in music, and she suggested this series, saying that she had taught them piano herself. The other thing she said was that exposure was everything: When the kids are exposed to the music early on, they just know how it sounds. She said the first time her son played the trumpet, it sounded right, whereas she had never heard jazz and saxes before she learned it.

I took the books home and we went through the first lesson. It will be interesting to see if we can stick with it. I know we need to keep it very short so that he doesn't get bored. I'm hoping the upside of it being dedicated Mommy time will outweigh any tedium of repetition. I do think the books are good--lots of pictures, and as Mary said, you start out with songs and rhythms and notation right away, so that makes it more entertaining.

I also saw an Aebersold book at the music store: How to Learn Tunes. I flipped through it and would like to buy--or borrow--it. The author had some excellent points:
--Trust your memory, because if you don't, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
--Too many people depend on fake books now rather than memorizing tunes.
--Make lists of tunes organized by form, key, style.
--Know how many bars are in each section (A section is 8 bars, followed by 16 in the B section, followed by a 4 bar coda).

I can't remember the trick for memorizing the chord changes. My only problem with the book is that it did have a lot of tunes in it, but they were mostly instrumentals I was unfamiliar with. I'm either going to have to buy it or speed read it in the store, I guess.