12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 111
Date: 04/21/2013
Instrument: Alto saxophone
Location: Lecture Room 331 in the University of Washington School of Music. Seattle, WA
Notes:
This is my first improvisation in the 12 Moons series that was specifically inspired by the music of another musician. I spent about an hour with my friends and fellow saxophonists Ivan Arteaga and Jacob Zimmerman beginning work on Roscoe Mitchell’s composition Nonaah, scored for 4 saxophones. The percussive, driving nature of Nonaah has always greatly inspired me, and the quartet adaptation features a wonderful variety of tempos and material. I recorded this improvisation immediately after leaving the rehearsal, and I felt inspired me to carry Roscoe’s compositional model into the recording space.
In Roscoe’s composition Nonaah, there is a very defined melody that is worked and reworked and re-tooled during each of his performances. The melody itself is very rhythmically disjunct and covers a range spanning about 3 octaves. In my improvisation today I explored the model of disjunct melodies with a very tight center of rhythmic gravity. I approached the improvisation with no particular melody in mind, but very much like Nonaah I leaned heavily on chromaticism displaced by octaves. I divided the improvisation into 4 sections, those being: 1. Short, percussive melodies in wide range with little space between pitches. 2. Short, percussive melodies in wide range using more space between pitches. 3. Long, chorale-like melodies in wide range moving from one pitch to the next. 4. Low octave, sweeping pitches that dovetailed one pitch into the next.
-Neil