Tag: Back to the Sax

Sopranoed! WX5ed! Fluted! But… Argh!

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UPDATE (27 March 2014): Hold on! Looks like my students were wrong, and there is one sax tech somewhere in Saigon. Problem is, I’ll have to track him down myself: I went to the music shop my student mentioned to see if they had something that could remove the stuck swab, and they told me that, no, they can’t, but there’s a saxophone repairman in District 10 who can do it. They called him and he confirmed that he could. The catch? They tried to tell me I couldn’t go there myself, I had entrust the horn to their care. …

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All Blues

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Another week, another tune. This one’s a classic, and strictly speaking, it’s actually just a blues in concert G. But I was trying to capture some of the original Miles Davis version. (On which all the solos kill me, though I used to focus on the Coltrane; lately, I’ve reached a new appreciation of just how badass Cannonball Adderley was–that’s the first sax solo, for those who are curious.) These days, I’m trying to get better at walking the line between “inside” and “outside”: the more traditional, “tonal” sounding playing that I’ve been working on since picking up the horn …

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How High The Ornithology, or, The Contrafact

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Well, I was slowed down a little by a crazy ear infection, but I’m back. Here’s my take on two tunes, which are actually kinda-sorta one tune: “How High the Moon” (1940) by Nancy Hamilton (lyrics) & Norman Lewis (music) “Ornithology” (1945) by Charlie Parker & Benny Harris My take on this pair of tunes is flawed: I had to slow the backing track to make it playable with both tunes, my attempt at Bird’s famous Ornithology solo is haphazard, and the sound quality is something I’m not happy with… but I still feel like I have achieved something, compared …

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WWSRD? (What Would Sonny Rollins Do?)

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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 …

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Coursera Jazz Improv Class, Week 2 Homework

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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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