Interesting what you find out. I was reading up about Dizzy Gillespie the American jazz trumpet player and music innovator and I knew he was a member of the Baha'i Faith like me but what I didn't know was that a guy called Mike Longo who was also a Baha'i worked with Dizzy Gillespie well before he got religion and what Mike Longo said about jazz education in the United States which is quite influential in all branches of music education,

"I know jazz education is an important thing and I know that the field means well, but there seems to be a trend in that field to teach jazz where people are actually copying off recordings instead of actually learning to play jazz. The apprenticeship aspect of jazz has always been the way it has evolved." (Mike Longo).

Ever since the mid-1990s when I came up to the north-east and started paying more attention to what local musicians were playing in their solos, guitarists and keyboard players mostly and also listened to what recorded artists were playing like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix ,I noticed that quite often passages from some of the solos for the north-east guitar players and keyboard players sounded like solos from major artists. I know that musicians copy passages in order to learn how to play their instruments as well as improvise but I think there is an awful lot in what Mike Longo is saying. There are thousands of books about rock and pop improvisation and invariably they involve simply playing transcripts of jazz and rock solos. I really think this is the wrong approach and a healthy respect for what has come before and then finding my own musical voice is the right approach.

Whenever I go out and play with locals the first thing I do is to fit in with the style of the music being played and then a close second is trying to play something that is original but still within the style.

What I also found interesting about Mike Longo from my Baha'i point of view is that what he is advocating will increase musical diversity rather than people copying each other. Amen to that. This could also explain why a lot of rock and pop music has done as well as it has because whilst there is an acknowledgement of what has gone before rock, pop and the various styles of rap music try to innovate all the time and I think that is a good thing.