12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 237

Date: 08/25/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

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

Notes:

After a few days of working with very finite textures in both my practice and recording, I decided to develop an improvisation that balanced loose, gritty melodies amidst more controlled ones. This is a challenge for me. It’s often the case that I improvise more freely when doing either a very controlled piece, or one with much more reckless abandon. The combining of the two is a technique I love to work with, and as stated, requires a very different kind of focus for a piece to come out successfully for me. During my recording process, I improvised a series of pieces. Some were much stronger than others in execution. In each piece I improvised melodic cycles and some kind of more stable harmonic chord.

This recording uses a sound world that balances two areas of pitch material. Area 1 had an abstract, improvised series of fingerings that tended to center around the pitches (in the tenor key of Bb):

C-Ab-Bb—-

I then continued the fingering cycle but adjusted my embouchure pressure to bring out new pitch cycles in the upper register:

F-Eb-Bb—-

The held chord occupied the sound Area 2, with the following fingering and pitches:

Pitches (in ascending order): G#, F#, C#

(Left Hand) B-A-G keys, Octave, Low B // (Right Hand) E-D keys

-Neil

The image “Untitled from the series ‘Ten Thousand Things That Breathe” accompanying today’s post by Renato Orara (2003).