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Bill Mithoefer (Monk'sDream) hipped me to a cool streaming Jazz video site called JazzVision.com, which is part of the Jazz Corner network. It's the first dedicated video s
haring and video networking site dedicated to Jazz. It's nice not to have to filter through all the swearing baby, nervous hamster and gnad cruncher videos like on YouTube. Thanks Bill.
him. I'm still reading about the early 20th century and the meteoric rise of the sax in America. It seemed that back then there were as many sax quartets and all-sax orchestras as there are garage rock bands now. Most big companies had a sax quartet to boost morale. If you were a good saxophonist then you even had a much better chance of getting a good job. These aattb sax quartets were the precursors to the swing band sax section. It's hard for me to imagine how a sax quartet like the Brown Brothers could be what a rock stars are today. These guys were making $1000 a week almost a century ago!
h the master. In this book Lee talks about his days with Lennie Tristano's group, opening for Bird, working with Miles Davis, his early development as an improviser, his composing, the music business, and much more. This is a great read even if you aren't a huge Konitz fan, and you'd be developmentally disabled if you weren't (see how PC I am since I was chastised by an angry reader for calling someone a retard, I really meant Lame-o). Lee is still playing his ass off in his eightieth decade and his experience as a Jazz musician is invaluable to any young player. Lee's thoughts on improvising really made my think about my entire approach to playing. He talks about how he doesn't consider himself a virtuoso, like Chris Potter, who can captivate an entire audience in rapt attention. He never tries to force any emotion into his music, he just tries to develop good melodies. Lee seems to be very concerned with musical purity and doesn't ever compromise his approach just to please an audience.
hel Ray and Mose Allison's lovechild.
ery note right in tune, but it didn't feel as centered as I would have liked. New Mark VI neck go for as high as $1700, no kidding. It's insane. I might be able to get lucky and find a beater for $600, but I wouldn't be able to try it first to see if it's any better than mine. Besides, I don't really have an extra $600 to drop on a neck.
e are even some wood necks being made now by a few different companies. I have yet to try one of these.
oblem that you think are related to your neck is to have someone who knows what they're doing refit your neck so that it makes a tight and even seal in your horn. A loose neck can cause some major problems over the entire range of the horn, so can one that isn't even fitting.
Photo: Sergio Cabanillas González
and the usage of everyday city life as a subject. He taught at the Art Students League in New York and had a profound influence on 20th century painters such as Stuart Davis, Rockwell Kent, and Edward Hopper."Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing thing, anything, well. It is not an outside extra thing.
When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it, shows that there are still more pages possible.
The world would stagnate without him, and the world would be beautiful with him; for he is interesting to himself and others. He does not have to be a painter or sculptor to be an artist. He can work in any medium. He simply has to find the gain in the work itself, not outside it.
Cherish your emotions and never undervalue them.
We are not here to do what has already been done.
Know what the masters did. Know how they composed and improvised, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You can make yours. They can help you. All the past can help you.
A music student must be a master from the beginning; that is, he must be master of such as he has. By being a master of such as he has there is promise that he will be master in the future.
A work of music which inspires us comes from no quibbling or uncertain man. It is the manifest of a very positive nature in great enjoyment, and at the very moment the work was done.
It is not enough to have thought great things before playing the music. The moment a note is played it carries inevitably the exact state of being of the musician at the exact moment of the tune, and there it is, to be heard by those who can hear such signs, and by musician himself, with perhaps some surprise, as a revelation of himself.
For an musician to be interesting to us he must be interesting to himself. He must be capable of intense feeling and profound concentration.
Don't worry about feeling unappreciated. Everybody that's good has gone though it. Don't let it matter if your music is not "accepted" at once. The better or more personal you are the less likely likely they are of acceptance. Just remember that the object of playing music is not simply to sell CDs. It is all very fine to sell CDs or play concerts, but you are playing for yourself, not for the audience.
The music student is not an isolated force. He belongs to a great Brotherhood, bears great kinship to his kind. He benefits by taking and he benefits by giving.
Through music mysterious bonds of understanding are established among men. They the bonds of a great Brotherhood. Those who are of the Brotherhood know each other, and time and space cannot separate them.
If the musician is alive in you, you may meet Bird nearer than many people, also Monk, Pops, Trane, and Miles. In certain recordings- a few bars into the first tune you know that you have met a brother. You pass people on the street, some are for you, some are not."
I reconnected with Steve Neff on the Sax on the web forum (where he is know as Nefertiti) when I sold him an hard rubber Otto Link alto mouthpiece. We both went to Berklee in the late 80's and studied with many of the same teachers. After I sold Steve the Otto Link I checked out his website and was pretty impressed. The site was geared toward
education and had a lot of interesting material on it. Steve has recorded himself playing a bunch of different alto and tenor mouthpieces (and posted them on his site. I think they are very helpful for players who would like to hear the differences between the top brands before they lay out the big bucks.
t patterns in all keys (one pattern to a page). These patterns are just nice traditional sounding Bebop lines, no
t too bland and not too outside. These are perfect for getting students more comfortable navigating through ii-V7 progressions. They are also 'non-descript' enough to use without anyone being able to tell where you got them from.
first book that I've seen that isolates this one aspect of improvisation. This stuff isn't groundbreaking in it's basic content, but it's just what students need to work on in order to master this aspect of improvising."The dominant bebop scale is an essential tool in playing jazz. It is used all over the place in jazz music. If your transcribing jazz solos you won't have to go long before you find some variation of this scale being used. In my Approach Note Books I tackled Major and Minor tonalities pretty thoroughly. In this book I focus on the dominant tonality and what to play over it. The book starts out with the basic dominant bebop scale. the next section deals with what I call "Bebop Scale Links". These are small phrases or patterns that can be inserted into the bebop line to add variation. The next section deals with "Dominant Resolution Links". These can be added to the bebop scale when the dominant chord is resolving down a fifth. The last section of the book I write about how to use and practice these scales and links over a standard blues progression. I provide a 4 chorus blues solo to demonstrate."I'm always looking for these sorts of books for own personal practice regime (as pathetic as it is). There are several things I look for when buying a Jazz practice book.
whole harmonic space as such, beyond the conventional understanding of what is convenient. Preferences for certain Harmonies should not lead to fixations that means to prevent one to explore the special characters of less known harmonies and appreciate them. In context the general tolerance towards the display of colors as such and their varying effects is broader-less strange. This may be caused by the development of modern art, the painting and an acceptance on a large scale. To present the interaction of the effects of color and tone, one uses the intervals of 12 tones within music to approach an approximate objectivity. These intervals and structures show the scales of music as colour and as degrees of light in progression. It will be shown by first establishing the criteria for the 3 basic colors through the intervals and than explaining how they fuse within the modulation of the scales' structure and functions in the vertical and in the horizontal.
I had a chat with Bob Mover yesterday. We talked about the huge debate that my Bob Mover-Cookoo's Nest post had stirred up, both on this blog and on the Sax on the Web forum. I just e-mailed him the many pages of heated comments about what he had said about the state of Jazz education. He did want me to stress that he didn't have anything against playing in odd time signatures, he just felt that young players should first learn to swing in 4/4 first.
I first met John Gunther at Berklee where both auditioned for the Heb Pomeroy band. That was by far the most brutal audition of my life. John, Doug Yates and I were battling it out for just alto two spots. Today those guys are two of my favorite saxophone players.
AAJ: How do you compose as a drummer? Is it a little different approach when you sit down to write?
JW: Pretty typically. There's a drummer in Detroit named Lawrence Williams, who's a great composer. Some of his music is featured on albums by, like, Geri Allen and Marcus Bellgrave and people like that. One device that people from Detroit told me that he used was that he would, before even thinking melodically, he would write out a whole rhythmic idea. A whole thing that made complete musical sense, but only using rhythm. Then he would assign notes to it. That's something I tried on a couple of the tracks. Composition is still pretty new to me, so I'm just trying whatever it takes. But most of the time I have an idea and I'll sing it. And then whenever it starts to make a certain amount of sense, I'll go to the piano. And then the song will kind of unfold.
ll the dogs for a two mile radius go nuts. The least annoying way to use the castrado range of the saxophone is when you make it a natural extension of the normal range. A few guys my age who do this well are Mark Turner, Matt Otto, and Doug Yates. They usually approach altissimo in a way that doesn't make you cringe. You don't always realize that they are upstairs, because the timbre sounds like the rest of their horns, and they work their way up and back down before they make Fido start howling.
ange, since altissimo note are really just overtone notes. Mastering overtones (not necessarily to the Sigard Rascher extreme) will also help you gain control of your timbre, meaning you will be able to control the upper partials in your sound. Being able to shade your sound consciously is a wonderful skill.
consideration for choosing a fingering, technical considerations will be a close second, and lastly will be the timbre of the fingerings.
In my mind the two saxophone teachers that had the biggest impact on saxophonists on North America were Joe Allard and Joe Viola. Of course there are other great teachers who were/are also true masters of the horn, but many of them are more firmly based in the classical tradition.
