This is a book I read the other day, and it’s a really great educational/reference tome. However, if you usually are here for fiction reviews, it may not be for you. If you play saxophone, on the other hand…
Haynes Saxophone Manual by Stephen Howard
Tag: saxophone
Team Sports and Values?
I always find it funny, seeing parents talk about the value of team sports: they’re always, always people who play team sports as adults, and how they loved playing them as kids. That’s fine, and I don’t contest that a kid can, while playing a team sport, develop his or her teamwork skills, discipline, understanding of the virtue of sacrifice, and grasp of the value of hard work. But… I value those same things, though I didn’t enjoy—and never really played—team sports after elementary school (and even in grade school, I never played them much). So then where did I pick up those values? The …
Learned in the Studio
Recently I stumbled upon a track online that happens to be the first studio recording I ever made. It was a guest appearance on a folk-pop album titled Xylon I, by a local musician named Xylon Cozens, and I play soprano sax on a single track. It’s odd: there’s basically nothing online about Xylon, or the album, even though it was recorded in 1995: I guess that says something about my own personal sense that the Internet caught on about that time: it did for me, but everyone was still on dialup, and it didn’t seem apparent that the Internet and music would necessarily …
다방 밴드 Flashbacks
A post announcing the publication of a memorial website for a band I played in back in Korea… plus photos from back in those days, and some reminiscences.
In Lieu…
… of an actual blog post, the last recorded musical homework of my Introduction to Jazz Improvisation course that I’ve been taking over at Coursera. Two tunes this week, because we have no analysis/written homework this time. The first was a blues in concert F: Yes, the horn section sucks. But I wanted the tune to have a little more oomph. I actually made the foolish assumption that the track was going at a steady tempo, but it wasn’t, so I couldn’t cut and paste the horn section stuff to another chorus as I’d intended. Ah well… (EDIT: I redid …