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 …
What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 5 — What I Listen to When I Listen to Popular Music
This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series. In Part 3 of this series, I insisted that I actually do consume some of what everyone surely agrees is “popular music” by my definition of it–a hybrid form of performance art incorporating not just music but other performing arts, from theater and narrative storytelling and verse to fashion, makeup, dance, and more hyperreal narrative arts that are relatively new to the world, such as video and internet presence-management. But I also insisted that …
Phil Barone’s Tone Production Exercises
Note: I wrote this about ten days ago. I thought I’d posted it, but I hadn’t. So I’m posting it now, backdated. It’s probably not of such pressing interest to most people reading this blog, so I don’t mind doing that even if it means some people will miss it. It’s basically all about my current practice regimen, my interaction with Phil Barone online, and my return to the saxophone.
Back to Sax
Those who visit my webpage (as opposed to reading it via RSS) will notice that over the last few months I changed my gravatar (to a friend’s caricature from 1995 of me with a saxophone, which you can see to the right), and then I changed the template and the layout of the pages in the top menu, and added a lot of headers, including a few with me playing saxophone, like these below: The template change had been necessary for a while, but the selection of images of me playing music in the headers has not been incidental. Ever …
Wanna Turn on a Wind Musician?
Checking out The Bis Key Chronicles, a saxophonist’s blog, I ran across this post about a Bb bass sax that this guy is having built for him. I followed on to the homepage of the instrument maker who’s building it for him, custom with a low-A key, Benedikt Eppelsheim Wind Instruments, Munich, and, well, this is what I’d call porn for wind musicians. There are clips so you can hear what the instruments sound like, too. I don’t know… the Bb Tubax seems a little TOO extreme for me, but I’m suddenly thinking I might prefer a Bb bass sax …
Baritone Insanity
I’ve decided I simply must get all of the Hamiet Bluiett Baritone Nation albums. This page has some audio samples that finally convinced me that I need CDs in which the majority of the band is playing baritone saxes. (More samples of another Baritone Nation CD here.) This is some heavy stuff. I like it. I shall have to order these or something, since I doubt any music shop will have ’em just sitting on the shelf.