The public library rocks! (and the story leading to this conclusion)

Long day.... anyway, I had a lesson with Marc this morning, and we were talking about boards. Now, I am a very self-motivated practicer, especially when I can practice what I want. Which has essentially been the situation this year so far. But that nasty five-letter word is creeping up: BOARDS. Which always means lots of patterns, scales classical solos and tunes played to Jamey Abersolds.
Now there has always been something deeply unsettling about those Jameys to me. They always seemed to take the fun of learning jazz and turn it into an exercise. I've always loved transcribing and learning by ear, which is why i got so into jazz in the first place (besides the fact that its totally awesome), and exercises, believe it or not, always made me want to throw up all over the place.
So Marc is always asking for my input and feedback on what we're doing, and I usually don't have much to say. But when he asked, "Now, do you have the play alongs for the tunes on this board?" I said, "Ok, I have some input to make now." I've always wanted to just learn tunes from the original jazz recordings, and yes the Clayton brothers told us to do that when they were here at CCM, but every really high level jazz musician has been telling me to do this my whole life. Even (heaven forbid) David-Baker-bebop tells people to learn tunes from the recordings. So I told Marc I wanted to try going recording-only for these board tunes, he was a little taken aback and skeptical, but he knows I get my shit done one way or another and was like, "I'd be a bad teacher to tell you no, although I don't know how we'll do assignments...." I hope I didn't step on any toes with this suggestion, but I feel like I make so many concessions when preparing for boards, and this is one I just couldn't go through with.
As a sidenote, Marc definitely received all his jazz exposure before the jamey abersold era, and I'm a little surprised that he's SO INTO THEM. They must be a real novelty to him.

Now, of course I had to find recordings of the tunes for the upcoming board. But I am too broke to buy the cd's, and feel very uncomfortable about file sharing. So I went to the downtown public library for the first time. It's a HUGE building, they have a very nice jazz collection, and when using the online catalog, all you have to do is type the artist or name of tune you are looking for, select "jazz recordings" to narrow the search, and hit enter. So convenient! I picked up some John Coltran, Milt Jackson, Jimmy Smith and Ella Fitzgerald. Delicious.