I ordered six fibracell reeds for my tenor and they just arrived. Only took a few days.
After hearing about it from my teacher, Todd, I got them from Weiner Music
So far, that’s all I have gotten from them, but they seem proming.
Anyone else ordered from them before?
Neal,
My biggest frustration right now is technique. Between octaves I have
tendency to squeak….particularly C to D; it’s most apparent. It got to be so bad that I took my horn in for
service but very few adjustments were made. In fact, I was told the
horn played extremely well.
So, its gotta be me – breathing, embouchure or technique.
Nat
Neal: So these notes come out fine when you play them? It’s just going between them that you have the problem?
Could be something with your fingering. You should be keeping your fingers on the keys all the time.
If you go between C and D very slowly, is there still the problem?
Nat: Neal,
I figured it was my fingering once the local sax tech played it
perfectly after some minor adjustments from normal wear and tear.
Now 7 or 8 times out of 10 there isn’t a problem. When I slow down, its
almost perfect.
Nat
Neal:
Cool, glad you got that working. When you slow things down you can work on them a lot more easily. Kind of make exercises out of things like that and they’ll get better.
Zoot Sims- tenor saxophone and soprano saxophone
Hank Jones- piano
Milt Hinton- bass
Grady Tate- drums
Recorded at A&R Recording Studios, NYC, on August 9, 1973
Alto saxophonist Charlie Parker was one of the most influential jazz musicians of all time. Known also as Yardbird, or simply Bird, Charlie was an early bebop pioneer; many of his songs remain standards to this day.
It might surprise you, but Charlie Parker started playing the saxophone at age 11, but wasn’t a child prodigy by any stretch of the imagination. He joined the school band at age 14, and by one account, was kicked out because of his bad playing as a result of his lack of formal training. Charlie didn’t let setbacks bother him though, and an in interview once said that for three to four years he practiced 15 hours a day. Part of this practice regime included playing the blues songs he learned in all 12 keys. During this time, Parker’s improvisational skill flourished, and he began to develop some of the musical ideas that would give birth to bebop.
In the late thirties, Charlie played with local jazz bands in the Kansas City area. Ensembles led by Count Basie and Bennie Moten were popular in the area around this time and influenced Charlie’s playing. By 1938 Charlie Parker had joined pianist Jay McShann’s band, Jay McShann’s Territory Band. The band played all over the southwest and occasionally travelled to bigger markets such as Chicago and New York.
It was with Jay McShann that Parker would play on his first professional recording. Bird moved to New York in 1939 and took a job as a dishwasher at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack to supplement the income he made with Jay McShann’s Territory Band. Pianist Art Tatum frequently played at the venue and his use of fast paced arpeggios would have an influence of Parker’s playing.
By the late 1970s, Barbieri had shifted his focus again, this time to the pop jazz that was becoming prevalent at the time. During this phase of his career was recording for A&M Records. One of the most successful albums of that time, and one of the most successful of his career, was Caliente. The album featured a Barbieri’s cover version of Carlos Santana’s Europa. Another big album during his years with A&M Records was Shadow of the Cat. A&M label owner, and jazz trumpet great, Herb Alpert played the trumpet for three songs on that album.
Barbieri’s wife died in the 1980s and six weeks after her passing he underwent triple bypass surgery. Because of the toll these events had on him, Barbieri disappeared from the public eye for quite some time. He returned in an impactful way in 1997; his Columbia Records release Que Pasa was the fourth best selling contemporary jazz album of that year.
In 2004, Universal Music honored Gato Barbieri by releasing a compilation of his work in their 20th Century Masters series. The other musicians to receive that honor in 2004 were Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker, and Carmen McRae. Gato was also honored by his home country the same year when the Argentine Ambassador to the United States presented him with a lifetime achievement award at the Argentine Consulate in New York City.
Gato Barbieri plays a Selmer Mark VI tenor saxophone with a short facing Berg Larsen Metal 105 mouthpiece and Rico 1 ½ reeds.
Argentinian tenor saxophonist, Gato Barbieri, has been entertaining jazz fans for over half a century. Gato Barbieri is Spanish for “Barbieri the cat”; his real name is Leandro Barbieri. Gato’s career has spanned from free jazz, to Latin jazz, to jazz pop and in 2002, Gato released his 50th studio album. He first took up music with the clarinet, at age 12, after hearing Charlie Parker’s Now’s the Time.
Gato Barbieri began his professional music life playing the alto saxophone with pianist Lalo Schifrin in Argentina during the 1950s. While in Lalo’s band, Gato would get the chance to play shows with some of jazz’s greats, like Coleman Hawkins and Dizzie Gillespie. In 1962, Gato moved to Italy, the homeland of his first wife, and took up the tenor saxophone.
In Italy, drawing influence from John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and Pharoah Sanders, Barbieri began collaborating with trumpeter Don Cherry. As a sideman for Don Cherry, Gato Barbieri played on two free jazz albums, Complete Communion and Symphony for Improvisors.
In 1969, with the release of The Third World, Barbieri began his career as a band leader. His music began to show a South American influence and garnered him enough recognition that he landed the job of composing the film score to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. His success on that film score landed him a Grammy award and a recording contract with Impulse Records. It also launched a profitable side-career for Barbieri; he scored over a dozen films in three different continents.
Continued from Sonny Rollins Part I
By 1959, Rollins had become a huge star; rather than believing his own hype, Sonny took a hiatus from music to insure that his musicianship grew proportionately to his fame. In his own words, “I was getting very famous at the time and I felt I needed to brush up on various aspects of my craft. I felt I was getting too much, too soon, so I said, wait a minute, I’m going to do it my way. I wasn’t going to let people push me out there, so I could fall down.”
While on this hiatus Rollins had a hard time finding someplace to practice with the frequency that he wanted. He was conscious of other peoples feelings and didn’t want to bother his neighbors with the constant sound of his playing. One day while walking around town, Rollins happened across the Williamsburg Bridge. He noticed that there was very little traffic on the bridge, and that it was long enough that he could practice in relative isolation. Sonny spent many hours practicing on that bridge, and would allude to that fact when he recorded his next album.
Rollins’ return to music would come in 1962 with the release of the The Bridge. His live shows during this time would become known for their long improvised solos, combining Rollins’ impressive knowledge of popular songs with his amazing improvisational skills. By the mid sixties Sonny Rollins would play with his idol, Coleman Hawkins. Other noteworthy collaborators during this time include Don Cherry, Paul Bley, and Jim Hall. Sonny took another break from music in 1966 after becoming frustrated with the music business and getting into eastern religions. During this next break, he spent some time in a monastery in India.
After his return in 1972, the impressive list of musicians with which Rollins’ played grew to include names like Tommy Flanagan, Jack DeJohnette, Stanley Clarke, Tony Williams, Ron Carter, and McCoy Tyner. He won his first Grammy for his 2000 release This is What I Do and his second for 2004’s Without a Song.
Sonny Rollins plays a Selmer Mark VI saxophone with Rigotti reeds on an Otto Link or Berg Larsen mouthpiece.
He lists his main influences as Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Jordan and Fats Waller.
At about 3:55 Joe Henderson starts his solo.
The song is great too.
Got this question from Jeshurun yesterday about scales.
good day neal.. neal may i ask some help? do you know a site that teaches pentatonic scales or chromatic?
-Jeshurun
For a chromatic scale, you just start on one note and go up and down chromatically. Certain fingerings make it easier to play faster.
A pentatonic scale has five notes- in the key of C, C, D, E, G, A. So you take the notes from the major scale and play the root, 2nd, third, fifth, sixth.
A minor pentatonic is somewhat similar, starting on C, it would be C, E-flat, F, G, B-flat. It has the root, minor third, fourth, fifth, and lowered 7th (relative to a major scale).
Knowing your major and minor scales will help you with playing these.
Tenor Saxophonist, Sonny Rollins is a true musician, a man who walked away from rising fame to practice alone atop an isolated bridge rather that let his legend grow faster than his creativity. Rollins started as a piano player before being given his first saxophone at age 13. That first saxophone was an alto, a nod to saxophonist Louis Jordon. Rollins would switch over to tenor at the age of 16, inspired by his idol Coleman Hawkins. By the time he was 20, Rollins was playing with the legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. Other notable musicians that Sonny had played and recorded with by then include Miles Davis, J.J. Johnson, Babs Gonzales and Bud Powell.
Between 1956 and 1958 Rollins released a string of recordings that would earn him a reputation as one of the most talented and innovative saxophonists in the jazz world. The first track on the 1956 album Sonny Rollins Plus Four, Valse Hot, was one of the first jazz songs to play bop in 3/4 time. His widely acclaimed album ‘Saxophone Colossus’ exposed fans to Rollins’ first foray into calypso inspired playing on his arrangement of the traditional song St. Thomas. In 1957, after a string of problems with incompatible pianists, Rollins released the album Way Out West, which featured Rollins’ saxophone stylings backed only by a drummer and bassist.
How do you usually practice your scales?
If you’re rough on the edges for a few, concentrate on those. I just started working on the major scales from the top of the horn down. Doing the key of E this week. I can play them all fine in one octave, but the extreme ends (high and low) of the range are not as clean.
So I’m doing ‘microscales’ – five notes of the scale up and down starting at high E and going down to the bottom of the horn, all in the key of E.
Practicing too much material is not generally a good, if you spend that time in a more focused way (on less material), you’ll sound better on the stuff you do play.
Want to play saxophone, but feeling lost and not sure how to get started?
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Want to take your playing to the next level?
You’ll learn fundamental saxophone skills, building past the basics. Master rhythms. Learn about phrasing, tone, and more. Here you will get feedback which is crucial to developing good habits.
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