12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 278
Date: 10/05/2013
Instrument: Soprano saxophone
Location: Outside my cabin at Mt. Index. Mt. Index, WA
Notes:
My wife and I spent the day up at our cabin. It’s located at the foot of Mt. Index in the Central Cascade Range about 7 miles past the town of Gold Bar. The weather was too good to be inside the cabin, so we spent the day keeping ourselves warm around the fire ring to spite the chilly alpine wind blowing down off the mountains. With no set agenda or obligations I spent many hours of my day practicing and improvising. However, even though I came to the horn easily I found it hard to tackle my 12 Moons recorded improvisation.
The mood of the day was light but the my surroundings were so extraordinarily grandiose, I wanted to honor the space with an appropriate improvisation. After over an hour of false leads I naturally came to this piece. Staring straight out at the craggily-toped peaks of the Cascades I tried to improvise a piece that mirrored their severity and amazing statliness. During this improvisation I used quick, wide angled single pitches with rapid single tonging and slap tonging. As one large mountain peak has many smaller ridges and bumps I worked to give this improvisation that character. The piece maintains steady pacing overall until the conclusion, where the density of sound begins to dwindle away into unaccompanied single pitches with wider gaps between their execution.
-Neil
The image accompanying today’s post is Mt. Index and surrounding peaks in the Central Cascades.