Hayden L  
Instruments: Saxophone
Styles: Jazz

My teaching experience started in June of 2023 when I started to work at a summer camp run by the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. During the camp, I worked with children from grades 2 all the way through high school. This gave me a lot of experience finding ways to teach people at varying experience levels. I also currently teach private lessons to college level students. In these lessons, we focus on developing overall musicianship, transcription, time, and improvisation. These lessons have given me a great perspective on providing useful tips to help my students practice efficiently.

For all of my students, our first lessons will be focused on either setting a foundation for beginning musicians or finding what the student wants to work on to become a better musician. In my opinion, the most important foundational aspect of being a musician is developing a passion for music. No matter what level my student is at, we will work on having an appreciation for music. This will include focused listening of music in our lessons and I will show my students the importance of this so hopefully they start doing it on their own. Along with the guided listening, we would also start with fundamental musical skills. For any instrument, this would include scales and modes, time, and technique, and for saxophone this would also include sound production. I'm primarily a jazz musician, so my lessons would also include developing the ability to improvise. Improvisation doesn't necessarily have to happen in a jazz context, but that's how I would be teaching it. I would have them start working on solo transcriptions (ear training!) because I believe that’s the best way to learn how to improvise. I would ask the students to transcribe and then I would show them how to integrate what they’ve transcribed into their playing (using material over jazz standards, playing them in all 12 keys, editing the material to make it work in different places). I’ll also teach them different harmonic concepts and slowly get into more advanced topics as they progress.