Orbert,
I’m a jazz pianist from Chicago who has followed CJP for years. I run The Recording Club in Los Angeles and build its software. I want to build one for your students.
Orbert,
I’m a jazz pianist from Chicago who has followed CJP for years. I run The Recording Club in Los Angeles and build its software. I want to build one for your students.
Saturday at VanderCook is three hours. The other six days a student practices alone, and nobody, including the student, has a record of what happened. That is where the practice habit is won or lost.
MakeMusic sells assessment of notated exercises at $13.99 per student per year. It is a solved, licensable input. Nobody has to build that part again.
Years of The Real Deal is you teaching jazz out loud. If the WDCB archive can be used, that is a body of teaching nobody else owns.
License assessment for notated work. Build only the improv layer, which nobody sells.
Play the exercise into the phone. Pitch and rhythm feedback comes back before they put it down.
A mentor built from your own words and from the way you teach on Saturdays, with the Listen Up, Make the Connection, Act It Out structure your DMDL work already runs on. The answer sounds like the room they were in.
Every session logged. When a student applies for the Danish Scholarship or walks into a college audition, there is a year of evidence behind them.
Who practiced this week, and for how long.
Who is stuck on the same eight bars and needs ten minutes in person.
Who is ready to move up.
A parent digest your team reads and approves before it sends.
Your own outcome survey already says 58% of students came out more comfortable leading and 88% more confident improvising. A practice record is what turns that into something a funder or a district can read.
Jazz Academy runs Saturdays at VanderCook from September 19 through May. Families are already enrolled and paying $295 to $495, so consent can go into your registration flow and no CPS data agreement is needed. I build the whole thing at no cost to CJP for that year. You keep the data and the relationships. Anything past the pilot we decide together once there are numbers.
Practice minutes per week
Weekly retention
Confidence survey delta
Parent digest open rate
Those four numbers are what a funder reads. Text me and we scope it before September 19.
Twenty courses is a production problem, and production is the part this makes cheaper. Record the Saturday sessions you already run. The mentor’s transcripts and those recordings become the raw cut, so a course costs an edit instead of a shoot.
JazzALIVE already runs in Chicago Public Schools. A district can buy a program it can measure far more easily than one it has to book.
The daily work lives in the app between visits. You hold the room. The school keeps the practice record after the residency ends.
Parents are already in your registration flow. We write the language together and your team signs off before a single student is enrolled in the pilot.
Text first. Voice only if you want it, and only on terms you set.
What CJPU can actually record without pulling your team off teaching. That is the real constraint, so we size to it.
I’ll come with the pilot spec written out and you tell me what’s wrong with it. If it’s useful we start scoping before the cohort does. If it isn’t, you’ve lost half an hour.
Greg Spero
Sources on this page: Jazz Academy dates, tuition and outcome survey from chijazzphil.org. Assessment pricing from makemusic.com. Photograph published by Chicago Jazz Philharmonic.