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).