I recently had the opportunity to make a couple of videos for young students on learning music by ear. The opportunity was through the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra’s Jazz Scholars program, of which I am proud to be a part. I believe that learning music by ear and transcription is an invaluable part of playing […]
Tag: tenor saxophone
Learning By Ear
Vocabulary
I’ve been talking with students about the use of vocabulary, “licks”, and learned musical sentences in improvisation in 20th century Black American Music. If we compare music to visual art, I think sometimes it can be helpful to practice improvisation more like creating a collage than trying to paint something completely new on a blank […]
Transcription Clip – Joe Henderson, “Song For my Father”
When I was 15 my family went to Berkeley CA to visit my brother at college, and the Tower Records store there had a CD called “The Best Blue Note Album Ever”, a double-disc compilation. I was getting into jazz/BAM at the time but I don’t think I knew what Blue Note was. I bought […]
Transcription Clip: Shanice, “I Love Your Smile”
I learned this short solo for fun for my wife a little while ago after we put the song on our wedding playlist, but lost the video on a broken phone! I decided to try it again and put it up here. After a little bit of research, I discovered the saxophonist is the great […]
Transcription Clip: John Coltrane, “I Hear a Rhapsody”
Playing Alto Saxophone exclusively when I was studying in college means that most of my knowledge is still pretty deeply related to that voice; I didn’t learn songs or jazz solos in all keys (which I should have), and for most of my time as a musician I heard ideas on alto rather than on […]
Transcription Clip: Melissa Aldana, “Free Fall”
This clip is from a solo from Aldana’s first album, released in 2010. I’ve really gotten into her playing the last couple of months for a few particular reasons. I think she’s one of the tenor players currently on the scene that really explores changing tone and expression while executing technical ideas […]
Paul Gonsalves Continued
Some more Paul Gonsalves from Diminuendo in Blue. I really like the mix of traditional and modern (at least to my ears) in his playing. The last chorus on this clip gets me every time!
Paul Gonsalves
I have a new project! I’m not sure how long I will last but I have begun working on Paul Gonsalves’ famous 27 choruses on “Diminuendo in Blue” from Duke Ellington’s 1956 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival. There is a lot of backstory surrounding this performance, none of which I can verify as true […]
Junior Walker
My earliest memory of “Shotgun” by Junior Walker & the All Stars doesn’t actually involve the song, exactly. I remember watching the Cosby Show with my family a lot as a kid, and I thought, when I was younger, that “Shotgun” was the theme song, at least for a couple of seasons. As it turns […]
King Curtis
A little yakety sax for your Thursday! One of my grandmothers had a bunch of old records that she would let me look through, and one of them was a Boots Randolph album. Randolph was famous for the record entitled “Yakety Sax”, the title tune of which became the Benny Hill theme song and was […]