My main personal focus is jazz. I play the flute as my primary instrument, and I was a self-taught flute player. And because of busy professional life and raising a family and stuff, I had difficulty ever finding time to practice, really, until I got more into my 40s, 50s and 60s. 

Now that I'm retired, I really have a lot of time to practice, so that's good! 

So anyway, I did start taking lessons more formally when I was in my 50s. I didn't have a background in jazz, but I became interested in my 50s. So that's what I've been focusing on in these years of my adulthood.

That's really important in the jazz world. Probably, I'm sure it's important in any musical context, but in the improvisational jazz world, to be able to really hear what the chord changes are doing, to be able to learn chord progressions by ear, learn melodies by ear... And that was an area that I felt I really needed to level up in terms of my musicality.

I had spent a lot of time in the last 10+ years on music theory as it related to jazz. My theory knowledge was way ahead of my ear abilities. 

So I really felt that was an area that I needed to work on. Any yeah, I was frustrated in terms of feeling like that, that part of my musicality was really not well developed. And I had teachers that helped me to realize that approaching jazz like a mathematical puzzle that needed to be solved through theory just really was not working.

And I just realized that in order for me to really develop this part of my musicality further, I just really needed to commit to it. And things that I had had a lot of kind of negative self talk around like that I couldn't hear chord progressions or chord qualities by ear, or that hearing bass lines was really difficult or those kinds of things.

So in terms of how the Next Level program helped my hearing improve, well, first of all, we focused a lot on singing, which was really great for me. And trying to sing melodies, sing phrases and find them on my instrument, sing licks as I would learn them, sing bass movement of chord progressions, scat-singing over tunes, just more free kind of improvisational singing. 

And so all of that I thought was really valuable and really helpful for me and something that I am incorporating into my practice daily these days. 

In terms of doing transcriptions, I really try to be able to sing whatever I'm transcribing, whether it's a solo of someone or a lick or anything like that. I really try to sing it so I can audiate it and then find it on my instrument. 

And I have completely left, for the most part, learning things by reading anything. So when it comes to learning a new chord progression, learning a new melody, anything like that, I'm doing 100% by ear these days.

What's one that I could share? Well, I think that the whole process of learning things by ear is so different than learning things off of a page. I can I re-learned some transcriptions that I had learned a number of years ago, but I learned them in a totally different way and it was a completely different experience. 

And somehow by doing things by ear, I was making all of these interesting connections like, okay, well, this is that shape or this oh, so that's a diminished arpeggio going up and that's how this connects to that. And just lots of really interesting musical connections that were there waiting to be discovered seemed to be popping out through the process of learning the melody or transcribing a solo by ear. So that was really cool and continues to happen all the time. 

When I go to my combo a lot of times we are being just essentially asked to look at a chart for the first time and then like, okay, here's the tune, okay, let's go. 

So a lot of times it's a tune that I haven't seen before, I've never played before, and so there's some component of just needing to see what the tune is about to begin with, but I try to get off the page as quickly as I can and just open up my ears. 

And certainly if it's a song that we're being given some warning about, like, if we have a concert and we have a set of tunes that we're going to be playing and we have a couple of weeks to work on what those tunes are, then I'll try to really get those, so that I'm not relying on written music to be able to play.

And then when I'm in my practice studio at home, I'm never looking at written music for the most part, except to double-check things sometimes. 

I think that I think if you're a self-motivated learner and you can approach the program with an open mindset, it's really almost limitless in terms of the directions that you could go and the areas of growth that one could move into. 

Whatever areas someone would think that they would like to work on, I think there's opportunities within this program to develop those areas and be developing multiple channels at one time. I think it's really great in that way. 

I would say my musical life is really important to me. And if you're willing to invest the time and effort into this program, this process, and approach it within an open mind and an eagerness to learn and to kind of be a vessel that's waiting to receive some teaching and inspiration, then I think that there's invaluable rewards to be gained through the process.