$5000 Tuba Book

[Tim Jackson]

This is old news for most folks here but if it helps a few it will be worth the rant!

Some time back I found a book that I can't put a price on but if I had to estimate the value:

I would pay:
$1000 for a chance to ask Jake everything I ever wanted to know about playing
$2000 puts me back in Chicago for a few weeks
$1000 worth of organized teaching material from the master
$1000 unlimited readings & applying the ideas
total - $5000

you see, when I was (I thought) a young hot shot player I made my trek to Chicago to attend Vandercook and study with "the man". I made it to the studio roughly once a month. Seemed like enough as the concepts were huge and plenty to work down in a month. Well, that's how green and unknowing(stupid) I was. (lessons were $25 then) I always regret not taking weekly but just didn't know any better & also my folks were really going out to even allow me the opportunity as the year in Chicago was much more expensive than my time at USM. As my advanced degrees concluded I took over and began my "self taught" journey. I spend plenty of time going over, reapplying, and cobbling together everything Jake told me. So many things weren't clear... so many things were getting misunderstood over the years. I read the first books to come out on Jake and that helped a little. When "Also Sprach Arnold Jacobs " came out I said "oh, I've read everything... I'll get it later"

And now the rest of the story!

I finally got my copy of Also Sprach Arnold Jacobs. This extremely well put together organized text of Jake's teachings IMO is the end all book every tubist should have. Before my eyes, everything began to connect - things/teachings I misunderstood now became clear and moved my playing forward again after years of inching along. You want high range... the secret is in this book. I'll bet just about anything about tuba playing you are wondering about is in this book. Well, maybe not making a living wage but who cares about money when you can play!

So, I would easily pay $5000 for a few weeks with Jake. To me the book is worth $5000 and at $22.95 why wait! that's a few small bottles of boutique valve oil. If you are really serious about playing the instrument - get this book and read it over and over and over. If you have the book and didn't find the treasure, read it again!

Like I said, this is old news for some, but if you don't know what the fuss is all about get on over to Windsong Press and get yourself a late Christmas present!


Better late than never.

[brianf]

Going on the road with Mr Jacobs, I had a way of getting information from him - Scotch. I got him into single malts and would bring a bottle of McCallans on every trip. I got a $10,000 worth of information from every bottle!

[happyroman]

Yes, this is an absolutely excellent resource and I highly recommend it.

There are a few other books that discuss Jake's pedagogy as well, by Kristian Steenstrup, Gregory Irvine and Luis Loubriel, all of whom studied with Jake. Dr. Loubriel transcribed 600 hours of taped lessons with Jake to supplement his personal experiences.

In addition, David Kutz published his Doctoral Dissertation on Jake's pedagogy, and it includes interviews with about 20 long time Jake students as well as transcriptions of several of Jake's master classes. One of the more fascination sections is where the former students describe specific etudes and technical exercises that Jake assigned, including how he wanted them studies and what the goal of the exercise was. It clearly demonstrates how Jake had developed musical solutions to the various problems brass players would bring to his studio. To my way of thinking, if you had a playing problem, he would assign specific music to work on. As you worked on the assignment, always with the focus of making the music sound great, the problem would be corrected over time, without ever focusing on what the meat was doing.

Finally, one of the best sources of info on Jake's pedagogy is the series of YouTube interviews Mike Grose has compiled on his TubaPeopleTV channel.

The Kutz dissertation, along with many other excellent resources, can be found at Windsong Press.