[manvsmachine]

Aagh, I had a ridiculously thorough reply, which I promptly lost when I closed gedit. The messy, truncated version:

I'm guessing that you play piano (in regards to the "novice" part). Marsalis is a jazz sax musician; the Marsalis family is probably the closest thing that jazz has to a household name these days. The point I was trying to make with him is that instrumental music training rarely has such a limited scope in terms of genre: in the case of piano, even the most hardcore classical-focused piano teacher would still have their students dabble with Scott Joplin or whatever.

Einaudi does comtemporary classical piano / string arrangements, sometimes with a mix of digital / world type stuff for ambience. "Giorni Dispari" is the first song of his that I heard, probably one of my favorites of his and not particularly hard to play if you can find sheet music: http://tinyurl.com/dnj7t3

I haven't played much lately, as I'm currently a sleep-deprived college student living in an apt. Last two songs I remember working with are Carly Comando's Everyday (you can actually buy the sheet music from her directly on her MySpace page for a few bucks) and Greg Maroney's Castle of Shadows. I've developed a serious bent for modern / minimalist stuff lately. My favorite piece I've ever played is Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# Minor; that song is a beast. It's definitely for the less experienced though, I doubt I'd be able to play it now without taking the time to get my skills back up to where they were.