Affiliated Artists Press Release

April 15, 2008

Jimmy Bruno Guitar Institute Shatters Enrollment Projections, Introduces Proprietary Technology
Napa, California.

The Internet based Jimmy Bruno Guitar Institute (JBGI) announces today that it has quadrupled in size, in just the last six months, to over 1350 paying students. Originally designed for 350 students, the JBGI has shattered all enrollment projections since opening in May 2007. “The growth has been phenomenal and gratifying”, says Affiliated Artists CEO and JBGI co-founder David Butler. “Now that guitarists know Jimmy Bruno’s unique and effective guitar method is available online, it has spread like wildfire.”

Jimmy Bruno’s New Worldwide Reach

Although never his intent, Jimmy Bruno may now be the most influential jazz guitar teacher in history, with students from 40 countries around the world under his direct supervision. Additionally, the JBGI student–body includes a large number of guitar teachers, who with Mr. Bruno’s permission and encouragement are in turn teaching Jimmy’s method to their students. Also, guitarists from areas of the world where there is no jazz instruction at all are converging on the JBGI to learn to play jazz correctly from an American jazz master.

Capacity concerns

Rapid communication amongst the close-knit guitar community, as well as open access to Jimmy Bruno has created a very large influx of students to the JBGI. Addressing concerns that the JBGI may be nearing capacity, Mr. Butler said, “It is true that we reduced our advertising while we regrouped, but we are committed to making the JBGI experience very high quality and it will continue to be available to all motivated students until our new technology is maximized.”

Innovation To Enable Broad Expansion

Empowered by proprietary video technology from JBGI parent company Affiliated Artists, Mr. Bruno interacts continuously with the JBGI student body. To keep pace with projected growth, a new generation video management system is in the late stages of development at Affiliated Artists, to be deployed later this month. “The new system automates much of the technical stuff, freeing me to spend more of my time with the students and focus on their progress,” said Mr. Bruno. Mr. Butler adds, “The new Student Video Management System will increase JBGI’s capacity to over 4000 students, roughly two years of projected growth.”

Groundbreaking Approach – Hundreds of “Virtual” Master Classes

A large part of the success of the JBGI is the result of jazz guitar master Jimmy Bruno’s “firsthand” interaction with JBGI students. Unlike static online sites, JBGI students receive direct and continuing guidance from Mr. Bruno through video interchanges, which keeps them on track. This interaction is in the form of “Master Classes”, an exchange of videos between students and Mr. Bruno. An added bonus is being able to watch him evaluate hundreds of fellow students via video. This combination brings a depth of knowledge unmatched in any other music instruction approach. There are currently over 450 Master Classes posted on the JBGI, with more added each week.

A Continuation of New Lesson Materials

Since the JBGI opened its door 10 months ago, the amount of lesson material has gone from around 70 formal lesson videos to well over 500 videos, including hundreds of “Master Classes”, and dozens of educational and entertainment videos. The JBGI recently added an adjunct faculty member, Philadelphia-based blues guitarist Johnny DeFrancesco, who created new JBGI course materials that focus on blues and blues-oriented rock.

The JBGI Sports A New Look

In addition to an under-the-covers technology overhaul, the Jimmy Bruno Guitar Institute has just been given a new look. Designed by Grammy-winning designer Jack Frisch, the new look enhances JBGI’s leading edge music instruction mission and signals yet another phase of continued growth for the Institute.

About the Jimmy Bruno Guitar Institute

The Jimmy Bruno Guitar Institute, a partnership between Jimmy Bruno and Affiliated Artists, LLC., was launched May 22, 2007. It is now one of the most successful music education web sites in history. Find it at http://www.jimmybrunoguitarinstitute.com

About Jimmy Bruno

Philadelphia-based Jimmy Bruno is considered by many to be one of the most talented jazz guitarists living. Mr. Bruno has released 13 CDs and numerous DVD and educational products. He continues an extensive recording and performance career, appearing on April 16 at the Iridium in New York and Blues Alley in Washington DC, June 12. His most recent CD is the critically acclaimed “Maplewood Avenue.”

http://www.jimmybruno.com

About Affiliated Artists, LLC
Founded by David Butler in 2006, Affiliated Artists forms partnerships with leading musicians, offering strategic vision and turnkey technology to create new businesses that monetize their “brands” and generate reliable, recurring revenue streams to augment (and sometimes even surpass) performance and recording revenue.

http://www.affiliatedartists.com

Contact:
Patricia Butler, CFO
Affiliated Artists, LLC
patricia@affiliatedartists.com
707-225-7227

I’m learning how to improvise to Satin Doll and have been searching for renditions I like on youtube.

Here are some videos that I found:

Something Satin

Satin Doll – position study #1 (A great version by a fellow advanced JBGI student Telebop that impressed Jimmy Bruno)

Satin Doll – John Pizzarelli

D.Dvareckas – D. Elington Satin Doll

And here’s a humble attempt from me (with mistakes and all) limiting myself to one area of the fretboard. I’ve never really been able to improvise but have managed to learn so much with Jimmy Bruno’s method. The video is not perfect and I’m still struggling to learn and play the tune in all areas of the fretboard, so please don’t expect to see something that will blow you away.

Record My Mind

Smoke on the water – Ancient Japanese style

Via Neatorama (link, which got it from Clifford Pickover’s Reality Carnival, one of the most fascinating authors I’ve come across)

Guitar

2008 Guitar Player Readers’ Choice Awards

Atlas of plucked instruments

The Mind

Oliver Sacks, Mystifier of the Mind

Jazz & the Mind: Researchers hope that jazz can reveal the brain’s secrets

The Monty Hall Problem:And Behind Door No. 1, a Fatal Flaw from NYT’s John Tierney

Rebate Psychology in the NYT:

Decisions depend very heavily on how people’s options are described.

People are more willing to treat 600 people infected with a deadly virus when they are told the treatment will save 200 of those lives, than when they are told that it will kill 400 of them. People are more likely to donate to a charity when the cost is described in terms of pennies per day instead of dollars per year. And more people say they could live on 80 percent of their income than say that they could save 20 percent of their income.

Descriptions are the psychological equivalent of a camera lens. Psychologists use the term “framing effects” to describe their influence. An investment banker who is delighted by saving $5 on a pair of shoes but disgusted by receiving $1,000 for a year-end bonus has experienced the power of framing effects.

Books

Paul Theroux on new VS Naipaul Biography “The World As It Is” by Patrick French:

After years of using prostitutes, the turning point in Naipaul’s life comes in 1972 when he finds a woman he desires: Margaret, whom he has met in Buenos Aires. She apparently refused to be interviewed for the book, but her archived love letters supply the missing narrative. They are rapturous, despairing, pleading, speaking of “his cruel sexual desires”. She acknowledges that he is her black master, that he regards his penis as a god, that she will worship it, abase herself.

This word “master”, used often in the letters, is interesting. It is a slave word. In role playing – and most of these love letters refer to highly eroticised power games – the master is regarded as dominant; but, paradoxically, it is usually the submissive person, the masochist, who has the ultimate power – maddening for the sadist.

Here is one instance. Margaret shows up unexpectedly in Wiltshire. Naipaul is displeased with her. He beats her and afterwards explains, “I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt . . . She didn’t mind at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her. Her face was bad. She couldn’t appear really in public. My hand was swollen.”

“Margaret was Vidia’s ideal woman,” French writes. “He could string her along and mistreat her with her abject consent.” He later writes, in paraphrase, “She said she had done things to Vido that would have made her sick with anybody else, and yet she longed for the time when she could do them again.” It is no exaggeration to describe the relationship between Naipaul and Margaret as a version of The Story of O.

Another article from Literary Review on the new VS Naipual biography:

French treats his private life scrupulously. He shows how much Naipaul owed to his first wife, Pat, whom he met when both were at Oxford. She helped him through a nervous breakdown, chivvied him with good advice, supported him from her earnings as a teacher in the first years of the marriage, organised his daily life, and remained his most devoted and admiring reader and adviser. But she could not satisfy him sexually; he had, as he confessed when already distinguished, frequent recourse to prostitutes, an addiction he found necessary but shameful. Then in Argentina he met a married woman, Margaret, who gave him for the first time in his life full sexual satisfaction.

Something else but in the same depressing vein: Melvin Bragg on sucide, loss and his breakdown

Excerpt:

As the novel recounts, he began a new relationship (with Cate Haste, the writer who has been his wife for the past 35 years). He and Lisa agreed on a separation. Divorce proceedings started. Then, in 1971, on an evening when he postponed going round to see her, she killed herself, with their daughter in the house. “It was an incredible rupture,” Bragg says bleakly. “It was a rupture because she went, it was a rupture because I had a crack-up, it was a rupture because of the analysis, it was a rupture because one’s whole life spiralled out of control. And there was such pain. And the death of Lisa just never stops.”

China and Olympics 2008

Olympic Regret by Tom Scocca at the Boston Globe
Excerpt:

But the People’s Republic makes an irresistible villain in the ongoing international dramas, for both fair and unfair reasons. To old-line Cold Warriors, it is an unrepentant godless Communist dictatorship; to the post-Cold War left, it is a cradle for unchecked global capitalism at its most abusive. It is taking manufacturing jobs from the Western working class and flouting the ethical and environmental values of the intellectual class. It still handles dissent by locking up dissenters. It is hostile to freedom of the press, which guarantees it bad press.

Religion

Christian Buddhists:

In the late 1980s, “there was a Hindu yogi who was offering a night class, and my students asked me what I thought about that,” she said. “I hadn’t heard him speak. I was thinking, ‘I’m a Christian, what can a pagan teach me?’ But the students shamed me into going to hear him. Here I was, teaching a course in religion, and I didn’t know anything about this.

“So I went to hear him speak. And when he got done, I said to myself, ‘There are a lot of things this man could teach me.’”

What Meadow will explain to her critics—at least the ones who do her the courtesy of letting her respond—is that there’s a distinction between Buddhism as religion and Buddhism as a meditation technique. One is a belief system; she doesn’t teach that. The other, the one she focuses on, is a process.

“Christianity includes a call to meditate, but it never provides a method of meditating, a step-by-step guide on how to do it,” she said. “As a result, a lot of Christian meditation gets stale because you get stuck. The yogi saw the problem right away and helped me fix it.”

For her, the turning point came when she finagled her way into an intensive meditation workshop in 1989.

Other Stuff I Enjoyed Reading and Should Have Posted Earlier

All the links below are from the Economist 2007 Christmas Issue.

Mao and the art of Management:

Born a modestly well-off villager, Mao lived like an emperor, carried on litters by peasants, surrounded by concubines and placated by everyone. Yet his most famous slogan was “Serve the People”. This paradox illustrates one aspect of his brilliance: his ability to justify his actions, no matter how entirely self-serving, as being done for others.

Psychologists call this “cognitive dissonance”—the ability to make a compelling, heartfelt case for one thing while doing another. Being able to pull off this sort of trick is an essential skill in many professions. It allows sub-standard chief executives to rationalise huge pay packages while their underlings get peanuts (or rice).

...Mao’s abandonment of friends and even wives and children seemed to be based on a calculation of which investments were worth maintaining and which should be regarded as sunk costs. Past favours were not returned. According to Ms Chang and Mr Halliday, a doctor who saved his life was left to die on a prison floor after being falsely accused of disloyalty. Mao let it happen: he had other doctors by then.

...Under Mao, China didn’t drift, it careened. The propellant came from the top. Policies were poor, execution dreadful and leadership misdirected, but each initiative seemed to create a centripetal force, as everyone looked toward Beijing to see how to march forward (or avoid being trampled). The business equivalent of this is restructuring, the broader the better. Perhaps for the struggling executive, this is the single most important lesson: if you can’t do anything right, do a lot. The more you have going on, the longer it will take for its disastrous consequences to become clear. And think very big: for all his flaws, Mao was inspiring.

In the long run, of course, the facts will find you out. But who cares? We all know what we are in the long run.

Noble or Savage:

...There is a modern moral in this story. We have been creating ecological crises for ourselves and our habitats for tens of thousands of years. We have been solving them, too. Pessimists will point out that each solution only brings us face to face with the next crisis, optimists that no crisis has proved insoluble yet. Just as we rebounded from the extinction of the megafauna and became even more numerous by eating first rabbits then grass seeds, so in the early 20th century we faced starvation for lack of fertiliser when the population was a billion people, but can now look forward with confidence to feeding 10 billion on less land using synthetic nitrogen, genetically high-yield crops and tractors. When we eventually reverse the build-up in carbon dioxide, there will be another issue waiting for us.

The Match King:

If Birgitta is the patron saint of Europe, Kreuger was the patron saint of sinners; he was arguably the most brilliant and ambitious swindler who ever lived. In the first three decades of the 20th century, he built up an industrial empire founded on the most humble of innovations, the Swedish-made safety match, that lit a fire of speculative excess around the world creating, then burning through, fortunes that would be measured now in the billions. In the words of John Kenneth Galbraith, writing in 1961, “Boiler-room operators, peddlers of stocks in the imaginary Canadian mines, mutual-fund managers whose genius and imagination are unconstrained by integrity, as well as less exotic larcenists, should read about Kreuger. He was the Leonardo of their craft.”

Beauty and Success

Ike Turner obituary

Human Lemmings

Poker, a big deal

The Frank Vignola Quintet with Joscho Stephan – Nuages

The Frank Vignola Quintet – Funky Monkey

Flight of the Bumblebee

Limehouse Blues (with Bucky Pizzarelli)

Stardust

I finally installed WordPress 2.5 , the latest version of K2 (dated 10 Apr 08), and Kontera ads with the WordPress Ad Wrap plugin. I like the WordPress 2.5 interface, the automatic saving of drafts and best of all the “keep this post private” function. You’ll also notice that I have a new “Archives” page.

I’m all set to start posting again!