About your Course Leader
Alan Cook - Course Tutor
Alan Cook began his musical career while at grammar school where he ran the Jazz Society and the school Jazz Quintet. In his late teens he earned his first real money playing tenor sax in a soul band, and subsequently went on to play keyboards and sax with a variety of Rock and Blues groups, including ‘Trader Horne’ and the band of blues slide guitar hero Mike Cooper. It was while he was with Mike that Alan played on sessions with Harry Miller, Dudu Pukwana and Mongezi Feza, noted ex-pat South African jazz musicians who played with Chris McGregor’s ‘Brotherhood of Breath’.
In 1974 he went to study Jazz at Leeds College of Music, graduating in 1977 with a 1st Class Diploma. During his time at LCM Alan was a member of the house band at the famous Batley Variety Club, where he learned his craft as a purely commercial musician backing the likes of Neil Sedaka, Roy Orbison and many others. In the late ‘70s Alan wrote for and played with the very successful Latin / Jazz outfit ‘Semuta’, a band that toured widely in the UK for the Ronnie Scott organisation. This entailed playing support slots at the Club with, amongst others, Earl Hines, Dick Morrisey and Art Themen.
Alan then spent 11 years working as a Master Transfer Engineer with CBS Records and Sony Music, an experience that not only provided massive opportunities to listen in detail to music of all genres, but also an introduction to both analogue and digital recording technologies. During this period Alan achieved an upper 2nd degree in Classical music studies with the OU.
In 1996 he became a Music Educator, having gained a PGCE at Oxford Brookes University. He continued to be active as a freelance musician; running workshops and composing, and winning the Composition Prize at the 2006 Leeds International Jazz Conference. He was awarded an M.Mus in Jazz Composition by Leeds University in 2007.
Alan is currently Head of Music at Oxford & Cherwell Valley College of Further Education.
A Letter from Alan Cook, the course designer and leader ...
Dear Musicians
I have designed this course to provide aspiring Jazz musicians like yourselves with some of the skills and knowledge required to make real progress in your quest for achievement.
It’s a commonly held view that improvised music like Jazz can’t actually be taught because it depends so much on intuitive musical ability and raw talent. This may or may not be true and certainly not everyone is cut out to be a great original.
However those musicians whose deep love of Jazz gives them a commitment to the music can, and very often do, make enormous strides in their improvising abilities. The key to this is the approach to learning. To play improvised Jazz well requires that the player develops a much broader range of musical capabilities than is required in most other genres, and most Jazz workshops just don’t have the time to do more than scratch the surface of what’s needed. Giant Steps Courses have been specifically created to give aspiring Jazz musicians much greater learning opportunities than one-off workshops can provide.
While the format of each weekend session will be centred on playing, parts of the sessions will be given over to theory and listening. One of the most important steps in musical improvement is to develop the ability to analyse and understand what you are hearing without the need for painstaking transcription. (This also happens to be a key skill for anyone aspiring to session work.)
Also vitally important is to listen to your own playing. This is a key component of the Giant Steps Courses, where performances are recorded and played back more or less immediately for evaluation by all concerned, with a CD made and sent to you for home study. We will also be listening to and analysing relevant examples by iconic improvisers. Theory will figure in all the sessions and will be described in easily understood terms. It will primarily be concerned with chord-scale relationships and the idiomatic harmony of Jazz, describing how and why some things work and some things don’t.
I do hope you’ll consider joining us on this amazing journey, and look forward to working with you.
Sincerely,
Alan Cook