Last saturday night ended the thirty hour return trip to California.

Colombo (Sri Lanka) -> Singapore -> Hong Kong -> San Francisco

Went there for my friend’s wedding and traveled around the country for a while.

Taking a saxophone was going to be difficult and renting one didn’t seem very feasible.

So I decided to take a clarinet (and some tenor & alto saxophone reeds just in case).

The clarinet I took was my Yamaha student model since it’s made of plastic and wouldn’t warp because of differences in humidity and temperature (that can be an issue with wooden clarinets).

During the trip I played most days for a bit and acclimated myself to the instrument a bit more.  On saxophone I know a few songs, but I haven’t played clarinet much for the last few years.  So I figured out a handful of songs and played over their chord changes too.

We saw a few bands as we traveled about, so I sat in with two of them.  Mostly I would play along with whatever they were playing since we didn’t necessarily know the same tunes.  I would use my ear and it mostly worked out.  A couple times they said they would play along with a song I knew, but that didn’t work as well.

I also played some clarinet with tabla which is a special type of drum they have over there.  That was fun too.

With one group I sat in with, a little Sri Lankan kid took lots of pictures.  Then at the hotel during breakfast the next morning he came up and said I played well, that was cool.

After I came back, my embouchure on sax was rusty, but not completely gone.

A healthy dose of long tones is helping fix that.

Hopefully my lip survives the show tonight!

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Also, the Sax Improv Class is open and will start on August 2

Sax Station Online Sax Improvisation Class