12/28/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 362)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 362

Date: 12/28/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

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

Notes:

This morning I practiced for several hours before beginning the process of recording.  This was an intentional choice.  The 12 Moons project itself has, from day 1, become the center of my creative life each day this year.  I’ve made every effort to relieve myself of feeling any kind of burden with this daily task.  Each day I try and make the process of recording as relaxed as possible, taking advantage of my mood, physical location, and my practice session itself.  As the project is drawing to a close, I’ve specifically thought about the patterns that have emerged in my artistic process from day to day.  

More often than not I record during my practice session.  I’ve come to recognize a flat-out reality that once I’ve recorded, I feel a sense of artistic and personal accomplishment that often makes me loose focus on my instrument for the rest of my practice session.  Even if I urge myself to continue practicing, I often feel less reward at the end of the session, finding that the peak of my accomplishment was the recording itself.  This is of course diametrically opposed to the all important snails-pace of progress through focused, daily practice.  For this reason, in the last 1/3 or so of the project I’ve begun recording towards the end of my practice session.  Most days this works fine, but in others days, particularly when my artistic fluidity is slower than usual or if I feel pressured for time, this can lead to a heavy stress load, and often take much longer than usual.  However, even in these situations, at the end the day I feel fulfilled knowing that I’ve devoted even more time to the horn.  Today was one of the days when my artistic process moved slower than it general does.  It took time, but the piece eventually came.  

During today’s improvisation I used 2 fingerings and sang into the horn using upward pitch bends.  The improvisation was centered around a Concert Db fundamental, with the second fingering moving the piece into moments with an Ab fundamental.  I used continuous loops of the gesture as well as silence, soft and abrupt cut-offs.  I initially decided to use a single fingering, but during the mid point of the improvisation I felt the piece needed stronger contrast.  While singing in the upper side of a pitch bend I decided to move to a Low Bb fingering.  I chose this moment because this particular fingering would require a looser sub-tone embouchure in order to match the timbre of the Concert Db.   These fingerings were as follows:

Concert Db fundamental:

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

Concert Ab fundamental:

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

-Neil

The image “March 28, 1973"  accompanying today’s post by Charles Hagen (1973).

12/27/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 361)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 361

Date: 12/27/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

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

Notes:

Caught between holidays, I have the week off from teaching until after the New Year.  I went to bed early last night and woke up around 5am ready to start the day.  I leisurely went about my tasks this morning, interspersing the day’s obligations with reading, working on album material and practicing.  This relaxed but productive atmosphere highly influenced today’s piece.  I decided to work with two themes in this improvisation: Constant Resonance and Air Flow Articulation.

The term Constant Resonance comes directly from the 12 Moons project itself.  My wife and I recently discussed my use of the phrase as something that appeared fairly often early on in the project.  This is an evolving term for me, and in many ways is just an ever-present focal point in my playing.  I view Constant Resonance as a focus more on liquid, undulating tone textures as the main source for an improvisation, versus rhythm or melody, or harmony.  I worked to incorporate this theme with the physical technique of using my Air Flow as an articulation source verses my tongue.  During this improvisation I used a single fingering, and relied on the tongue movement inside my mouth, mouth shapes and air flow to explore pushing a pulling tones out of the horn.  

The fingering used today was as follows:

Multiphonic fingering with the following primary tones: F# (quarter step flat) G (quarter step sharp) and C#.  Many other pitches in the upper register emerged during the improvisation as well.

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

-Neil

The image “El Vendedor de Alcatraces” accompanying today’s post by Diego Rivera.

12/26/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 360)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 360

Date: 12/26/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

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

Notes:

This improvisation makes use of de-tuned multiphoinc chords, played in dominant to tonic fashion as harmonic gestures.   These multiphonics, written below as Chords 1-3, were very unstable and required a tight embouchure with very focused control to maintain them.  When I would pull the air flow away to dip down the volume, Chord 2 had a tendency to naturally evaporate into a Concert C, and Chord 3 into a Concert D.    I decided to approach these pitches as “melodic byproducts” from the multiphonics, and allowed them to speak once the horn and my embouchure let go of the multiphonic chords.  This simple two-note figure used tempered tuning, despite the fact that they originated within to very de-tuned multiphonic chords.  This provided me a link between the chordal movement and the simple melodic pitches.

As can be heard during the improvisation, the Concert C and D rang with precise control, and I took advantage of this by using diminuendo shapes from medium-loud to whisper soft.  The three chords used during this improvisation, as well as the two resultant “Melodic byproduct” pitches are notated below.

Chord 1: De-tuned D dominant chord

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

Chord 2: De-tuned G Major Chord.  Chord included the Melodic Concert C pitch.

(Left Hand) 1-2-3, Octave, Low C# // (Right Hand) 2, Side F#, Low C

Chord 3: De-tuned D dominant chord (new voicing).   Chord included the Melodic Concert D pitch.

(Left Hand) 1-2-3, Octave, Low C# // (Right Hand) 2, Side F#, High F#, Low C

-Neil

The image “Implements and Entrenchments” accompanying today’s post by Neil Jenney (1969).

12/25/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 359)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 359

Date: 12/25/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

Location: The rec room of my childhood home in Edmonds, WA 

Notes:

This improvisation uses a static drone figure played quietly, with melodic gestures above it that independently shifted in dynamic level from quiet to medium loud.  The concept of voice independence has been a continuous theme in my playing for some time now, but I’m now working towards adding a new level of depth to this concept by isolating fingering systems that allow for volume independence within the separate parts.  I used a single fingering gesture, which had a mid-register drone.   The melodies above it were approached freely and used a total of 4 pitches from the fingering’s overtone series, in addition to a 5th tone added by flexing my embouchure.  The fingering system was as follows:

(Left Hand) 1, Palm Key F only, Octave // (Right Hand) 2-3, Low C.  Trill the F key (1) in the right hand continuously.  

The static drone created by this fingering system was an F (quarter step high) in middle octave.  I worked to maintain this drone at all times at a consistent dynamic level, though there were a few moments when it unintentionally dropped out.  Above this drone were the 4 melodic pitches C#, F#, C, and E, all in the upper to extreme upper register.  The F# functioned as a central pivot point in the melodies, with improvised phrases moving towards and away from it.  A 5th tone, an upper register E was played by shifting my embouchure and scooping up into the F#.  As stated above, a central theme during this piece was to maintain a duality of thought–maintaining the static volume in the drone, and freely shaping the volume level of the melodies.  At a single point during the improvisation, I did pull the drone out intentionally to draw the focus to a single upper register melodic pitch, which was played at the high point of volume during the improvisation.  

-Neil

The image “Pretty much every” accompanying today’s post by Douglas Gordon (1992-?).

12/24/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 358)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 358

Date: 12/24/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

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

Notes:

In today’s improvisation I wanted to explore quiet bursts of sound energy.  To do this I used a nontraditional hand position that worked its way from an open fifths chord, and would break through into various sound clusters.  These sound clusters seemed to speak fully at a quiet to medium-quiet dynamic level, allowing their full colors to push through.  I felt that my emotional state played less a role in the sculpting of this piece than did the horn’s own willingness to offer up a beautiful range of sound.  

This improvisation used a series of progressively thickening layers of sound.  It opens with a single Concert E pitch in middle octave, which is then joined by a Concert B a fifth above.  To create each of these tones I used the following fingerings:

Concert E:

(Left Hand) 1-2-3, Octave // (Right Hand) 2-3

Concert E/B

(Left Hand) 1-2-3, Octave // (Right Hand) 2-3

For the E and D keys in the right hand (notated above as 2-3) I used my thumb and pinky instead of the Middle and Ring finger.  This freed up my middle finger to reach across and begin trilling the Low Bb bell key manually.  This began the third phase of the overall sound structure, which included an exploration of pitch clusters in the upper register.  At the mid point of the improvisation I moved back into the single Concert E, but took away the octave key.  This dropped the pitch by an octave and added a further expansion of range while incorporating the open Fifth (Concert E/B) and the upper register pitch clusters.  Despite the limited overall volume, I tried to create a wide dynamic spectrum, allowing the single pitches and clusters to rise and fall in volume between executions.

-Neil

The image “Melnikov Studio” accompanying today’s post by David Diao (2012).