Month: July 2013

Altissimo Chart for Yamaha YTS-32 Tenor Saxophone

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UPDATE (11 February 2024): Eleven years later, I’m now a parent who’s about seven years behind on practicing. I’ve lost my facility with altissimo, but am working on regaining it.  In the meantime, two observations: Experiment with adding a G# pinky key for these fingerings. Per a post over on Everything Saxophone, this definitely helps with getting the tone clearer and the pitch easier to play and more stable on the 3rd octave G, and may help with more, too.  On my (Antigua BS3220) bari, I find that the G# pinky key helps so much that altissimo G comes out even …

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Yes, White Cats Can Play Jazz, So Can We Talk About Something Else?

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Sometimes, the best way to figure out what an author knows about his or her subject is to find the bit of the book where the discussion is of a topic you know something about: you can usually pretty get a sense of whether the author is full of shit, or authoritative, or something else entirely. So it’s a bit discouraging that when I picked up Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts and turned to the chapter on Louis Armstrong, that I found a tiny blurb about Armstrong’s life and contribution, followed by this quote: …

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The Rite

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“The Rite” appeared in Bibliotheca Fantastica, edited by Claude Lalumière and Don Pizarro, and published by Dagan Books in late June 2013. There are many ways to buy the book listed here. Incidentally, the book was published just a couple of weeks after the centenary of “The Rite of Spring,” the orchestral work discussed in the story. (The premiere and world-famous riot happened in Paris on 29 May 1913.) That’s kind of cool! Background: When I started studying music at the University of Saskatchewan, my exposure to “classical music” had been limited to the Schubert, Schumann, Bach, and Mozart that …

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No Access, They Said

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They being my ISP. They didn’t say it, though, except through an error code. I can’t access this site, my own website, except via Tor. (Not Tor.com, I mean this Tor.) I can’t imagine my site has actually been added to any watch or block lists, since I’ve written practically nothing there about this country I’m now in… but I still have to use Tor to get through and post. It’s been hectic and busy the last couple of days, with lots to do, and lots to explore. My friends just flew back from the States and we were busy …

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Mouthpiece Deprivation, and the Saxo-fooooon, and Making Good Art

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UPDATE (6 July 2013): Woohoo! My Barone mouthpiece arrived in time to be carried back to me by my friends! Here’s the snap my friend sent me: I’m excited to get it on the horn and start getting a feel for it! Original Post: So, a week or so ago I screwed up my tenor sax mouthpiece. I was having some problems, and there was a persistent, weird problem I was seeing–my reeds weren’t really sealing, and I was seeing a weird moisture buildup on the table of the mouthpiece, where no moisture should have been going. It was happening …

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