My Band, The Standard Deviants, had a rehearsal this weekend. As usual, I tried to record some of it. As so often happens, our best performance was our warm up tune. This time, we performed a tune called “The SMF Blues” by my good friend Paul Campagna.

Someone asked (on Reddit) how to swing eighth notes. Here’s my response, somewhat cleaned up and expanded.

Don’t. If you try to swing them, they will be over done.
Play straight eighth notes. The “swing is done via articulation.

The Summer Youth Music School (SYMS) at the University of New Hampshire runs each summer. I attended it a couple years back in High School. The second year, I prepared a piece called Au Privave (No. 1) from the Bird Omnibook. This is a transcription of solo by Charlie Parker.

Charlie Parker played on alto, but I played tenor sax, and prepared the version from the B flat book, which was transposed down a fifth. It turns out that this radically alters the fingerings. Parker played insanely fast, and in doing so, he naturally sought out the fingerings that flowed smoothly and naturally on the Saxophone. And then he played them at superhuman speed. It turns out that transposing it up a fifth radically changes some of the fingerings, and also puts many of the notes out of the range of the Saxophone

I bombed the audition.