12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 157
Date: 06/06/2013
Instrument: Tenor saxophone
Location: Practice Room B at South Whidbey High School. Langley, WA (Whidbey Island)
Notes:
I decided to wait until the end of my teaching day to record, and after a long and productive teaching session that stretched into the early evening I stepped into a different practice room to record this improvisation. The space called me towards recording a piece focused around a busy, cyclic fingering pattern. My fingers settled into a 11 motioned pattern with only 4 distinct shapes. I decided to completely maintain the fingering system and articulate at an even pace with each of the 11 motions. The reverberant room and nature of the fingerings created a wide swatch of colors in the space and the horn itself. I maintained the consistent sextuplet articulation but decided to gradually slow the tempo slightly as the piece progressed.
I approached this improvisation from an inside–out perspective, beginning the piece with a very strict sound pattern, and gradually fracturing my ideas until reaching a point of pure sound exploration at the conclusion of the piece. The fingering system used was as follows:
a. (Left Hand) B-A-G keys, Octave, Low B // (Right Hand) F-E-D keys, Low C
b. (Left Hand) B-A-G keys, Octave, Side Bb, Low B // (Right Hand) F-E-D keys, Low C
a. (Left Hand) B-A-G keys, Octave, Low B // (Right Hand) F-E-D keys, Low C
b. (Left Hand) B-A-G keys, Octave, Side Bb, Low B // (Right Hand) F-E-D keys, Low C
a. (Left Hand) B-A-G keys, Octave, Low B // (Right Hand) F-E-D keys, Low C
b. (Left Hand) B-A-G keys, Octave, Side Bb, Low B // (Right Hand) F-E-D keys, Low C
a. (Left Hand) B-A-G keys, Octave, Low B // (Right Hand) F-E-D keys, Low C
b. (Left Hand) B-A-G keys, Octave, Side Bb, Low B // (Right Hand) F-E-D keys, Low C
c. (Left Hand) B-G keys, Octave, Side Bb, Low B // (Right Hand) F-E-D keys, Low C
d. (Left Hand) B-G keys, Octave, Side Bb, Low B // (Right Hand) F-D keys, Low C
c. (Left Hand) B-G keys, Octave, Side Bb, Low B // (Right Hand) F-E-D keys, Low C
-Neil
The image “Blue Green Orange Yellow Red” accompanying today’s post by artist Ellsworth Kelly (1968)