Hal Galper review of Ran's book, Primacy of the Ear, posted on Amazon:
5.0 out of 5 stars A must for the serious jazz student! April 28, 2013
By Hal Galper
Ran Blake has managed to preserve the oral tradition while keeping it contemporary. Those who know me will be aware of how much George Kochevytsky has inluenced my teaching, Art of Playing The Piano. Ran's ear training program fits exactly into his theory that all music is played by ear. It the way I learned how to play. For example, when I was a Berklee student in the 50's, many of us lived in a five story apartment building at 905 Boylston St., right behing the school. All of us being broke most of the time, when a new Miles Quintet album came out, 10 or 12 of the cats would assemble in the room with the best sound system and we'd play it over & over and all sing the solos together until we could sing everyone of them with the record. Then we'd all try to sing them without the record. Once we had them internalized each of us would return to our respective rooms and try to play them on our instruments, almost exactly in the manner that Ron suggests.
His reference to Pauline Oliveras's concept of "deep listening" totally endeared me to this book as, without knowing it until I discovered her a couple of years ago, I had come to the same conclusions that most students don't know the difference between
"hearing," which is passive, and "listening" which is active and focussed.
Every jazz student should have it on their shelves. Hal Galper