Ramsey Castaneda, DMA
Performance, Education, and Scholarship
Over the past few years my focus as an educator has turned to de-mythifying and deromanticizing jazz education and jazz history. Nietzsche’s aphorism, “They muddy the water to make it seem deep,” seems an apt description for much of jazz education (though by no means all). My mission is to elucidate jazz performance (improvisation, theory, etc.) and deconstruct notions of jazz and authenticity found in traditional (and untraditional) jazz history narratives using techniques from melodic embellishment for im