06/13/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 164)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 164

Date: 06/13/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

Location: Practice room B at South Whidbey High School.  Langley, WA (Whidbey Island)

Notes:

I’ve come to feel very natural recording inside the small, mostly cement Practice Room B at South Whidbey High School.  The room is very bright and reverberant without distorting the sound of the saxophone into a wash.  Performing loud, abrasive improvisations seems to be a recurring theme for me in this space.  I love being encompassed by sound in that room until my ears are ringing and pulsing with the sound filling it up.  Today I decided to work with a wide spanning, bendable sound concept with a few sympathetic fingerings.  

I aimed the bell of my horn directly at the microphone, standing about 4 feet back from it, nearly against the rear wall.  The slight changes in fingering and embouchure movement created a multidimensional sound that seemed to fill the space from floor to ceiling.  I experimented with some slight declines in volume, but overall the improvisation was performed at maximum volume.  The wide upward and downward bends were achieved mostly by rapidly “chewing” my lower lip embouchure to pull out the full range of sound.  Between fingerings there were internal pitches that crept up or down by semi tones that gave the piece a tightly held range of harmonic motion.  The fingerings used were as follows:

(Left Hand) B-A keys, Octave, Palm Eb, Low B // (Right Hand) F key, Low C

-Same as above, but put F-E keys down in the Right Hand

-Same as above, but put F-E-D keys down in the Right Hand

The image “The Crouched Ones (Los agachados)” by Manuel Alvarez (1934).

06/12/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 163)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 163

Date: 06/12/2013

Instrument: Soprano saxophone

Location: Sharpe Park, outside Anacortes, WA

Notes:

My wife and I spent the day driving North on Whidbey Island, and eventually found ourselves in Anacortes.  This is a beautiful, thriving community that values art and wilderness, and I could think of no better place to record for this project than in this area.  A few months ago, the fantastic musician/composer Karl Blau took my friend Bill Kautz and I out to record in the woods at the Sharpe Park.  This heavily wooded, fantastic nature preserve bustles with wildlife, and is just such a calm space.  My wife and I drove around outside the city until we finally stumbled on the park, and we walked a short distance in.  I set up camp next to a small lake that was filled with cat tails and reeds.  It was a beautiful, clear Spring day, and I improvised with the call of birds all around me.

Anacortes is situated very close to the city of Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island, where a large US naval air base is stationed.  Throughout the day the tranquility of nature intermingles with the pervasive thunder of fighter jets souring through the air.  At 3 points during this improvisation airplanes can be heard in the audio.  However the planes were at a significant distance to my location and their sound was mostly peripheral.  During this improvisation I tried to open myself fully to the environment around me.  The constant sound of airplanes became one player in a symphony of sounds.  I spent 20 minutes or so playing before finally beginning to record.  The bird calls around me began to sound very familiar, and I could easily distinguish one type of call from another, and also one bird from another singing a common call. 

I explored upper whistle tones to put myself in the same octave range as the birds.  Some of the birds seemed to use the natural reverb in the forest more than others.  I noticed that the simpler, more pitch-oriented bird calls would ring out much more than the quicker, percussive sounds of other birds.  I tried to explore both ends of this spectrum during this piece.

-Neil

The image accompanying today’s post is the woods of Anacortes.

06/11/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 162)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 162

Date: 6/11/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

Location: Main performance hall at Chief Sealth High School.  Seattle, WA 

Notes:

I found myself in the large performance hall at Chief Sealth High School once again today.  With sufficient, uninterrupted time to record, high mental energy and a vacant space, I decided to work with the room on short, puckish phrases.  During this improvisation I focused on 2 fingerings and 3 overall actions, with the concept of a change in perception caused by a change in criteria.  There are often fingerings on the horn that when played on their own, will, with some measure of predictabilty create a specific pitch.  However, if that fingering is preceded by another particular kind of fingering the resulting sound of the second pitch can be entirely new.  This was the case during my improvisation today.

The 2 fingerings and 3 total actions used a total of two pitches.  In fingering 1/action 1, this used the tenor pitch “C” in the altissimo (extreme upper) register.  The 2nd fingering/2nd action used the pitch “C#” a half step above.  The 3rd action/1st fingering created the pitches C and C# together in a cluster.  Again, this 3rd action used the exact same fingering as fingering 1/action 1, but would only clearly sound this two-note cluster if coming directly from fingering2/action 2.  During the improvisation this chord cluster can be heard as the aggressive “zip” sound that occasionally ends a melodic phrase.

-Neil

The image “Predators” accompanying today’s post by Albert Kotin

06/10/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 161)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 161

Date: 06/10/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

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

Notes:

During my practice session this morning, I explored sympathetic key clacking inside of melodic phrases.  I approached it a variety of ways, including cross fading pitches and the key clacking, or creating different rhythmic cycles with the clacking itself while playing a melody.  I eventually settled on a bluesy theme with 4 pitches, where I performed a piece inspired by steel body guitar playing.  In my own playing I tried to replicate the twangy, gutsy tremolo by fluttering open and closed the lower stack “clutch” key on every pitch played.  I maintained this flutter only when actually playing a note and did this to give the effect that the clacking was more a part of the note sounds themselves rather than something used for affectation.   I used my index and middle fingering, rapidly alternating one after the other as though trilling two keys on a piano.  

This improvisation uses pitches divided in the upper register and middle register.  The upper register uses the traditionally tempered pitches Eb, G and Bb–an Eb major triad.  In the middle register I used alternate fingerings to create breathy, bluesy tones with the pitches Db and Eb.  These pitches used the following fingerings:

Db (Left Hand) Fork F, A-G keys, octave 

Eb (Left Hand) Fork F, C key, octave

-Neil

The image “A Near Distance” accompanying today’s post by Perle Fine (1961)

06/09/2013 (12 Moons Solo Project Day 160)

12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 160

Date: 06/09/13

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

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

Notes:

This morning I unexpectedly had to be on a 6:30am ferry back to the mainland, and found myself at my childhood house, horn in hand and fully ready for the day by 7:30.  During this time I worked on quiet, controlled gestures, scales and long tones.  I ended my practice session by working with three false fingerings on the tenor pitches “D-E-F."  This minor gesture became the fulcrum of my improvisation today.  During this piece I cycled the three pitches at a steady tempo and included the use of flutter-tonguing to punctuate the pitches.  As the improvisation evolved I began slightly adjusting my lower lip position, taking in just a bit less of the thick part of the lip and balancing more on the thinner outer part.  This technique allows for the core pitch to sound as well as extreme upper register chirping tones.  I worked to phase between the traditional pitches and the pairing of traditionally and chirped tones.  The fingerings were as follows:

Tenor pitch D: (Left Hand) Middle C, Octave // (Right Hand) Low C

Tenor pitch E: (Left Hand) Middle C, Octave // (Right Hand) F-E keys, Low C

Tenor pitch F: (Left Hand) Middle C, Octave // (Right Hand) F-E keys, Side C, Low C

-Neil

The image "Two Nudes on Purple Canvas” accompanying today’s post by Robert Beauchamp