12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project

Date: 01/27/2013
Instrument: Tenor saxophone
Location: Home studio in Clinton, WA (Whidbey Island)

Notes:

Due to a very busy schedule today I performed a series of improvisations this morning in the 6am hour. Though I live in a very rural area tucked away in the woods, my neighborhood is a working class area on the south end of Whidbey Island . Each morning beginning around 4:00am, a few cars begin their commute to various points on the island and mainland beyond. This morning, perhaps due to the fact that it is Sunday, I was able to perform completely uninterrupted by car noise for nearly an hour. This woods in winter can be astonishingly quite in the morning, and I was greeted with a warm silence to quite my mind before improvising. My piece today is accompanied by a second, complimentary improvisation that seemed an inevitable response to the first. Both were recorded at extremely low volumes with the gain turned high.

Due to the very quite atmosphere in my home, my mind naturally gravitated towards the polar opposite scenario. This morning I considered the unique feeling of walking against a crowd of people walking in the opposing direction. Though you bump shoulders with many people the experience is far from random. There are a variety of circumstances leading towards the physical encounter and I believe the contact to be more indeterminate than random. In this piece I explored this concept by using a single multiphonic fingering and indeterminately, or rather “at will” choosing to adjust my articulation and slowly begin to introduce an upper register pitch. In my second improvisation in this series, I chose to instead articulate a single pitch, and then sustain a multiphonic.

-Neil