What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 5 — What I Listen to When I Listen to Popular Music

This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About 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 …

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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.

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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 …

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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 …

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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.

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