Coursera Jazz Improv Class, Week 2 Homework

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 …

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Altissimo and Productivity

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 …

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Altissimo Chart for Yamaha YTS-32 Tenor Saxophone

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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On My Practicing: An Update

Original Post (updated at end of post): I have stopped posting here regularly about what’s going on with my return to playing the saxophone (because my practice log notebook, though no longer daily, is publicly available to anyone interested), but I’m in a contemplative mood about it all now, so I figured I’d post. In exciting news, the overtone exercises I’ve been doing at the advice of Phil Barone had been paying off. I really am a lot happier with my tone than I have ever been, and I’m getting a richer sound. Not only that, but I’m getting pretty …

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