11/18/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 322)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 322

Date: 11/18/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

Location: An outdoor walkway at CalArts (California College for the Arts).  Valencia, CA

Notes:

This morning Bad Luck drove down from San Francisco to Valencia for a clinic and performance at CalArts.  After the workshop, I walked around the main floor of the building for some time before finding a large outdoor walkway that wrapped around the South side of the building.  A busy, 4-lane road was a few hundred yards beyond the school, and the constant murmur of traffic could be heard while I improvised from the walkway.

Our clinic was a very productive and energy-filled experience, and I wanted to carry this spirit into my improvisation today.  During this piece I explored pockets of action with punctuations of my own silence.  However the constant hum of traffic had its own kind of persistence, with natural ebbs and flows as traffic increased or decreased.  I used my own silence as a very specific barrier to separate my trains of thought, while allowing the traffic noise to act as a bridge between these statements.  There was thematic material that naturally emerged from me while playing, but overall I worked to create a variety of sound textures and stylistic approaches, including hollering, screaming, false fingerings and multiphonics.

-Neil

The image “Orange, White, and Blue” accompanying today’s post by Ger van Elk.

11/17/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 321)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 321

Date: 11/17/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

Location: My brother’s apartment in the Haight district.  San Francisco, CA

Notes:

This morning Bad Luck had a two hour clinic in Berkeley, discussing our music, compositional process, and specifically the mixed use of electronics and acoustic playing in our band.  All of my playing is amplified in Bad Luck, and while practicing a bit during a free hour this afternoon I was happy to find myself back in a fully acoustic setting.  I practiced in a small room in my brother’s apartment, with my bell against a wall in front of me.  I improvised a piece that used constant tonging, exploring slight changes in my articulation and the harmonic profile of the improvisation.

During this piece I avoided allowing any of the resonating tones to emerge above a very low level of volume.  For this reason the recording was amplified quite a bit in order to clearly hear the intricacies of the improvisation.  This accounts for the disproportionately louder breathing.  The improvisation uses three fingerings and a light articulation with my tongue against the reed.  The three fingerings were chromatic, and I began with the second of the three.  As I moved from Fingering 2 towards Fingering 1, the harmony descends.  I then ascended back to Fingering 2,  and moved the harmony upwards into Fingering 3, and finally back to Fingering 2.  I followed this basic shape throughout the improvisation, moving at a flexible tempo.  As the piece progressed I began incorporating heavier and heavier articulation, which began gradually slowing the tempo down and adding harder tongue articulation.

The fingerings used during this improvisation were as follows:

Fingering 2 (the fingering which opens the piece) Mid range.

(Left Hand) 2-3, Low B // (Right Hand) 1-2-3

Fingering 3 (Low range)

(Left Hand) 2-3, Low Bb // (Right Hand) 1-2-3  

Fingering 1 (High range)

(Left Hand) 2-3, Low B // (Right Hand) 1-2-3, Eb key

-Neil

The image “The Shadow of Tragedy” accompanying today’s post by International News Photo (May 16, 1932.

11/16/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 320)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 320

Date: 11/16/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

Location: Wolf Creek, Oregon

Notes:

Today is day one of a brief, three day tour with Bad Luck down the west coast from Seattle to Los Angeles.  Our first show is in Berkeley, CA tomorrow morning, and today we’re making the full drive from Seattle down to the bay area.  Just before dark and about seven hours into the trip, I pulled off at the town of Wolf Creek, Oregon.  I followed a two lane road a few miles up into the woods.   It was a landscape of Pine and Madrona tress, with thicker, bramble covered brush underfoot.  Every few hundred yards or so a mobile home was awkwardly placed onto the landscape.   I pulled off at a spot 100 or so feet from some train tracks.  I found a path and walked the short distance until I came into a clearing with the rail line above me.  

I was inspired by the dichotomy of this environment.  The cold air was filled with the scent of pine and the metallic, oily tracks cutting through the wilderness.   I found myself out of eyesight from any people, but trailers were just on the other side of the tracks above me. I played for a few minutes and settled into a piece that combined a folk, picturesque quality with a more industrial, hardened approach to the harmony.  I had no defined pulse but worked to settle into a semi-constant feel. Once having established some small bits of melodic material, I began fracturing the established key center and combined this will trilled chords to work against the single-pitched melodies.

-Neil

The image “Near Morton, Mississippi” accompanying today’s post by William Eggleston (1972).

11/15/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 319)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 319

Date: 11/15/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

Location: Home studio in Clinton, WA (Whidbey Island)

Notes:

The past several weeks I’ve worked with at least half of my students on the music of Duke Ellington, and particularly in the phrasing and ornamentation styles of Johnny Hodges and Paul Gonsalves.  The popular high school festival Essentially Ellington is accepting auditions soon, and virtually every high school in the Seattle area sends in an audition tape.  With my alto students, we spend a lot of time listening to the original recordings and learning to imitate the wide, upward bends and deep vibrato that were such a stylistic hallmark of Hodges’ sound.  In today’s improvisation, I decided to work with my own interpretation of these upward bends, but with a much more animated and aggressive approach.

During this improvisation I followed a common Hodges approach into the bend, which included momentarily pushing against a pitch a perfect fifth below the final note that is held.  However Hodges’ approach was generally much more gentle and much slower than my own interpretation here.  I also occasionally used false fingerings to expand the vibrato between pitches of a greater distance from one another.  Again, Hodges tended to hold only a single fingering and use vibrato with about a whole step in total distance.  

-Neil

The image accompanying today’s post is of the great saxophonist Johnny Hodges.

11/14/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 318)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 318

Date: 11/14/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

Location: Home studio in Clinton, WA (Whidbey Island)

Notes:

This morning I felt extremely pressured for time.  During the 12 Moons project my days have spanned the gamut from several hours of flexible practice time, to quite literally only a half hour of uninterrupted space in the course of an entire day.  Less frequent were days like today, where I set out believing that I had only a half hour open to me, but my artistic process took on a much slower pace than my allotted time.  I ended up working and practicing instead for about 2 ½ hours, and then had to rearrange the commitments of my day in order to make up for this time now redistributed.  Today was an excellent reminder that no matter how busy my day may seem, I always have time to practice.

During this improvisation I explored the phasing of pitch material between different ranges of the horn through two different fingerings, combined into a single action.  These fingerings were as follows:

Fingering 1

(Left Hand) 1-2-3, Low Bb // (Right Hand) 1-2, Low C

Fingering 2

(Left Hand) 1-2-3, Palm Eb key only, Low Bb // (Right Hand) 1-2, Low C.  I also eventually began incorporating the Palm Key F into Fingering 2 to add further colors.

After more than 2 hours of practicing my work still felt stunted.  I decided to move between these two fingerings without any improvisational model other than simply to explore sound.  What resulted in the piece were many examples of “interruptions” in the flow of sound by more indeterminate elements, such as one note abruptly speaking more than others within a cluster.  I decided to embrace each of these moments, and used each “interruption” as a pivot point to incorporate a new motive into the sound cycles.   

-Neil

The image “Death Valley” accompanying today’s post by John Donohue.