The Kangaroo Method: Why Hopping Around Won't Get You Anywhere

Some teachers give information. Others give you something bigger— lessons that sticks with you for life. Calvin Jones, my mentor, the incredible jazz pianist and trombonist, did exactly that. He wasn’t just about scales and technique; he wanted you to think, to understand, to really get it for yourself.  There were no hacks, no shortcuts, no gimmicks, Jone's lessons were about mastery of the language and f you skipped a step, he had a name for it: "The Kangaroo Method."

What Is the Kangaroo Method?
Ever seen a kid jump from one toy to the next, never really playing with anything long enough to figure it out? That’s the Kangaroo Method. In music, it’s the habit of bouncing from one thing to another—learning a few bars of a song but never finishing it, memorizing scales but never using them, practicing something just enough to say you did it but not enough to own it. It’s surface-level learning. Jones had no patience for it.

“You can be a kangaroo,” he’d say, “or you can be a musician.”

I've heard his unmistakable voice in my head say those words over and over again, and not just about music. I hear it in my head almost anytime I try to learn something new - from starting a company, to learning to cook. Hopping around feels productive, but real growth happens when you stop, focus, and dig in.

The Fix: Deep Learning and Mastery
Calvin believed in going deep. You weren’t just going to “kind of” know a song—you were going to know it inside and out. If you were working on a blues, you’d play the melody, comp the chords, walk a bass line, solo over it, and know it in every key. If you didn’t know a tune so well that you could hum it in your sleep, you didn’t know it at all.

And this isn’t just for kids. I see adults do it all the time—watching a few YouTube videos and thinking they’ve “learned” something. But can you really do it? Could you teach it to someone else? That’s the difference between exposure and mastery.

Why This Matters for Parents (and Everyone Else)
If your child is learning an instrument (or anything, really), keep your eye out for the Kangaroo Method. It’s easy to mistake excitement for progress. But jumping from one piece to the next without mastering the basics leads to frustration later. The students who thrive—the ones who will have music with them for life — are the ones who stick with something long enough to feel confident in it.

Same goes for us adults.  Whether it’s learning an instrument, a language, or a new skill, the biggest breakthroughs come when you resist the urge to hop away when things get tough. Instead of grazing over everything, pick one thing and go all in. 

Calvin Jones was more than a musician—he was a teacher who taught me how to learn. And now, every time I feel the urge to jump to the next thing before I’ve really mastered the first, I hear his voice: "You a kangaroo, or are you actually learning something?"