eclectic music!

This week and last, after finishing up our first choreography project (more about that soon), we have been working on jazz technique… For the first jazz unit, while the kids were still getting used to me, I played mostly pop music. But this time I’ve branched out and at least 3 days out of each week I’ve used songs from my non-pop playlists – mostly world music, a bit of classic Motown – and not heard any complaints! After a year in middle school (where music isn’t music if it hasn’t played on the radio in the past three months), this has certainly been a refreshing change. Once this week, on my “classic Motown” day, I put on “Mr. Big Stuff” for isolations, and heard one kid say “that’s my song!” (Really? It was on the radio in my high school years, decades ago…). Another day, I was playing an instrumental piece by a fairly obscure world fusion artist (happened to be "Ethiopians" by Eyal Sela), and someone asked me "what's the name of that song?"… Hooray for being able to use eclectic music in class!