Samuel L. Jackson Teaches Acting
Interview: Rowan Hudson, Jazz Pianist
What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?
I think probably the best advice I could give is very boring – practice the fundamentals. A lot of people (myself included) neglect simple things like having good time, feeling comfortable in difficult keys (and minor keys), ear training, etc. too early in their development and move on to really complex concepts before the fundamentals are really in place. I definitely made that mistake and I now practice mostly quite basic things along those lines. Also, to me there seems to be a bit too much focus on harmony and not enough focus on phrasing and rhythm in Jazz education, maybe that’s just a personal thing. It’s difficult sometimes early on to see the timeline of your playing. The balance between getting the fundamentals together and also trying to find your own sound can be hard. I think most Jazz players now need to have very solid foundations to built on, maybe that wasn’t the case in the past for people like Ornette Coleman, who made his own rules. But nowadays it seems to be pretty hard to get anywhere without good reading, ability to play in different time signatures, ability to play modal tunes, etc. That’s not necessarily a good thing, but I think it is the way things are now.
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Idris Elba on Acting
Believe or not, Elba claims that he “winged” it since he had been just coming off a year where he trained to become a professional kickboxer. Elba explains, “I winged that performance, if I’m honest. Right after I won my professional fight — thank … God — I went to Toronto to work on it. I only had 12 days before I had to go to The Mountain Between Us. When you’re fight-training your brain is completely mush because you’re tired all the time, so I was literally going, ‘This is going to be the end of my career.’”
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Scottish Opera Encourages Audiences To Dress Down In Bid To Create New Opera Fans
Scottish Opera has launched a campaign to debunk the “myths” of the artform and to try to encourage new audiences.
Tongue-in-cheek posters display messages such as “you don’t have to dress up for the opera”.
Scottish Opera general director Alex Reedijk said: “Cinema doesn’t help with the cliches that are linked to opera.
“In real life, most people come to the opera dressed comfortably. Theatre audiences are very casual, and we are just trying to remind people that it is the same for opera.”
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Eddie Izzard on Creating a Character
As for preparation, while Izzard clearly does prep thoroughly, it’s also a process that he doesn’t seem to think about too much; it’s more something that he just gets on with:
“I’ve never measured it, say, this role is that, you just do what you feel you need to to get in. Also, sometimes coming into a role there might be a different length of time to prepare, but the more you can – I have noticed a reluctance in earlier years to know exactly where to start with research. Maybe it’s a laziness or lack of confidence about which way to go into it.”
“The obvious thing that came into my head, or that I realized, was the better you researched it – the better you are into the character before you land on the set, the easier it’s going to be. You’re just going to be fully formed, I mean, obviously Daniel Day-Lewis does this to a huge extent, and that’s what I want to do, that’s the direction I want to head to, so that when I’m there, getting to the set, I know where I am, rather than a week into it, getting the hang of it.
You get scared at the beginning of film acting, because ‘lock it up, OK, camera’s rolling’, huge camera next to your face, people measuring things, doing things, turning things, the focus puller. And I can’t even see it now.”
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Leonardo Frigo Spends Over 3 Weeks Illustrating Violins
Limits
