I have been a professional jazz pianist for 25 years and dearly love playing this wonderful music, and communicating that feeling and experience to my students.
I hope to be informative and plan to offer some insight into how musicians think about what they do, or at least how this one thinks!
If you're a professional musician and are concerned that people don't "understand" the nature of of your work and efforts, or their economic value, a thought from Hans Eisler that helps illuminate the problem.
I use this quote to explain why I believe that music, especially jazz music, should have form and structure. From the Poetics of Music by Igor Stravinsky...
"Strength is born of constraint and dies in freedom"- Leonardo da Vinci
