DIO: “Shame on the Night” Course Series – Part 1: From Elves to Egypt

Seven-Week Live Course Begins in 2025, stay tuned for date…

DIO: Shame on the Night – Course Series
Magic & Meaning in the Music of Ronnie James Dio

Last class date: TBD.

An immersive listening course series with organized playlists (audio and video), historical contextualization, weekly lectures, weekly assignments and additional resource lists. Intended for all who are curious about the topic, this course series is appropriate for musicians and non-musicians alike.

Course Information

Arguably one of the best singers of any style, in any era, Ronnie James Dio unleashed not only his singular voice, but a hefty catalog of epic and visionary music that both pioneered new genres and transcended categorical boundaries. The profundity and depth of his greatest works and performances is matched by the breadth of his 50-year recording career, starting in 1958 and ending in 2009 just before his death in 2010.

Dio’s legacy features him as the central axis of not one, not two – but three groundbreaking, top shelf hard rock bands: Rainbow, Black Sabbath and Dio (the band). Ronnie was either at the genesis of and/or in these bands during some of their most successful phases both artistically and popularity-wise. As we explore a myth-minded curation of his recorded catalog and live performances, this once-a-millenium artist will come fully alive for you and in the end you will know, in no uncertain terms – as Ronnie explicitly did – that magic is real, and it is what we are made of.

Course Instructor

Cornelius Boots Author

Wood Prophet and root philosopher Cornelius Boots has performed in most types of ensembles, at international festivals and up-close for goats with big horns. Boots has written, recorded, and released over a dozen albums of his original compositions and teaches his signature playing style to the curious and dedicated around the world. Forging his own no-holds-barred style as a professional woodwind performer/composer/teacher since 1989, he is a three-time graduate of Jacobs School of Music (BM Classical Clarinet ’97, BS Audio Recording ’97, MM Jazz Studies ’99) and licensed grandmaster (dai shihan) in the dynamic Zen shakuhachi lineage of Watazumido. The 1996 inventor of the bass clarinet quartet – now a popular modality in many colleges and communities – Boots is a sought-after composer, performer, and teacher, and is an active recording artist who has won awards and created fresh new repertoire for both bass clarinet and shakuhachi, reshaping the landscape of modern woodwind performance practice through robust expressive, signature techniques rooted in pan-stylistic depth and artistic evolution. After a 30-year career of high-caliber jazz, classical, rock, and experimental music activities (on multiple woodwinds with a focus on the bass clarinet), Boots has now positioned himself at the crossroads of personal expression and divine revelation, exclusively playing bamboo shakuhachi (jinashi/hotchiku) and its baritone brother, Taimu. He is the founder of Black Earth Shakuhachi School, and composes music for the Wood Prophets, the world’s first bass shakuhachi group.