Category: BACK TO THE SAX

WWSRD? (What Would Sonny Rollins Do?)

gordsellar0 Comments

The title of this post is a question every tenor saxophonist asks himself or herself at some point, and I think it belongs on a T-shirt. I’d buy a few of them for myself, to be sure! Anyway, what led me to come up with this expression is that my homework this week in my Jazz Improvisation course at Coursera involved recording the head (the pre-existing melody) and one chorus of (imporvised) solo on Keith Jarrett’s tune, “Memories of Tomorrow.” I actually have a relationship with this tune going back to high school: my saxophone teacher at the time, Mike …

Continue Reading

Coursera Jazz Improv Class, Week 2 Homework

gordsellar2 Comments

It’s probably silly of me to start with a caveat, but: this weeks’ homework could have been easy if I’d let it be. It’s basically playing six scales or modes, then improvising freely on them. This is the kind of thing I do for warm-ups every day, no particularly challenging in itself, even if some of the scales and modes are ones I haven’t practiced in a decade or two. But I believe that creative people grow by pushing their boundaries, so I decided that if I was going to do the assignment, I’d do it in a way that …

Continue Reading

Altissimo and Productivity

gordsellar4 Comments

In middle school, and early on in high school, I remember loving Saturday Night Live… which, for me, means “classic” SNL which, because I was born in 1974, means John Lovitz, Phil Hartman, Dennis Miller, Victoria Jackson (sigh) Jan Hooks, and Dana Carvey, mainly. But a highlight of the show–and what I always wished they’d include more of–was seeing (or at least hearing) Lenny Pickett wail on the tenor saxophone, as he did on the closing tune, week after week: http://youtu.be/lPAeCZZstK4 I’d wait through the R.E.M. and Randy Travis and Linda Ronstadt for those little clips of the house band… they were …

Continue Reading

Altissimo Chart for Yamaha YTS-32 Tenor Saxophone

gordsellar7 Comments

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 …

Continue Reading

No Access, They Said

gordsellar0 Comments

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 …

Continue Reading