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.
Continue readingDesign prototypes for a band logo
All images Copyright Adam Young.
Designed in Inkscape. Working title is “Smirking Sigma”
The font used is Beachman Script. by David Rakowski. It really seems to capture the classic feel of a fifties music venue.
When you start looking at Jazz lead sheets, you might notice a Chord with the Alt modification. This is an altered chord.
Continue readingSomeone 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.
I use the term permutations loosely here. But for any given chord inversion, there are 6 variations of the tones in the pitch you can play in order to play each tone once. What makes this an impure use of the term permutations is that the second and third notes of the sequence can go both above the starting note in one variation, and below it in another.
Continue readingGeorge Garzone is the Sax players sax player. He is a teacher that has taught the best of the crop that is out there right now. I had the privilege of studying with George back in high school. I can honestly say that no subject I studied before or since taught me how to think better than Jazz improvisation.
Continue readingWell enough to be dangerous. I was able to get the JACK Daemon running on my Lenovo Laptop running Fedora 32, and us it to record MIDI-based music.
Continue readingThe 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.
Continue readingWhen you play Saxophone, your whole body plays music.
Continue readingJazz improvisation performance. You’ve been preparing. You have mastered your instrument with long tones, scales, and exercises. You have worked on general knowledge of music theory, chords, and the relationship between them. Now what?
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