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Monday, May 15, 2006

Practice Makes Perfect

We've added yet another medical professional to our growing list of Jazz Practitioners, Adam Dachman, DO.

Adam has been called a healer. His music considered to be from a realm of peace and possibility. Interestingly, he happens to be a well trained general surgeon. And while medicine has received much of his focus over the years, music has been on his mind since childhood. Trained classically, Adam quickly became his teacher’s prodigy and competed nationally.

As the years passed, he became interested in composing his own music. Formal training in theory, jazz, improvisation, orchestration and production led to a seasoned young composer who still had to mature. So what better place to do it than in medical school. A graduate of the class of 1990 Adam went on to complete a surgical residency and set up a practice near Madison, WI. He released “Echoes In The Canyon” in 1998—his first solo CD. In 2002 he released “Center of My Heart.” In 2005 he released “Keys of Hope.”

Adam was recently interviewed on Bernie Siegel's Webcast show on HealthyLife.net. He and Matthew Zachary discussed Steps For Living, their groundbreaking organization devoted to music and cancer survivorship. You can listen to the archived segment here.

Friday, May 12, 2006

Jazz and Presentation

Garr Reynolds over at Presentation Zen has an article on Jazz and the art of presenting that you should check out. His area of expertise is in teaching people in business how to do effective presentations. But like the basic idea behind Jazz Medicine, he writes that jazz “still inspires me in my professional life as well as in my personal/spiritual life” and he points out that “it's lessons can be applied to other aspects of life, even the art of presentation.”

Or medicine.

He goes on to list a number of inspiring quotes from some of the greatest jazz musicians in history that apply to more than music. A few examples:

  • “The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.” (Duke-Ellington)
  • “It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.” (Dizzy-Gillespie)
  • “Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.” (Charles Mingus)
  • “A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.” (Herbie-Hancock)

Check out his site for more.