In a recent Jazziz interview, the wonderful singer Jo Lawry says, “I’ve been exploring the type of music that I’d like to listen to, as opposed to the music that I studied. They aren’t necessarily the same.”
Those of us who work our way through an academic music curriculum should continue to ask ourselves: what is the music that is true to me? How is that reflected – or not reflected – in academia?
The best thing you can do is take the skills you acquire through your formal education, and use them to make the music you want to make. Use the skills to make finer music, truer music, better-prepared music. But most of all, you-er music.