into the breach

I've got a saxophone!
had you heard?


anyway, I've had the honk-machine out twice today - once in the morning from just before 10 until about 10.30, when one of my pupils from school, Imogen, arrived for a catch-up lesson (Year 3 at Alpha School have the most fantastic social life! If you can impersonate a 7-year-old tolerably, see if you can get in there to join them - it's a lovely school when you're there too, so you won't need to be writing yourself sick-notes for the days you're not out on trips!)

anyway,
back to the sax.

I'd done some long notes & then asked Liz if she'd come in and play the piano (which she very kindly & tolerantly did) with me on the "Razzamajazz" book - it's great because the first tune uses 1 note, the next 2 (etc) until the book builds up to 10 notes (with 12 tunes, I think).

It was good doing it with the piano - apart from making the parpings less mournfully like someone stepping on the Hound of the Baskervilles's tail on a lonely & distant moor, it also gave me something to [try to] shape to.
Don't get excited by the idea of me trying to shape the tone - it's rather a crude shaping, more like introducing a moulding tool to a lump of plastecine, then leaving the two to get on with it, but it did make infintesimally small dents and bulges, which is nice.

My main aim in this playing through was to play a clean note each time I played a note - both starting and stopping the sound without adding in mating geese sound-fx before, during or after the note! This meant we did each little tune around twiceish

Our recital comprised;
B Groovy (featuring the note "B")
Two at Twighlight ("B" duetting with "A")
Stardom Waltz (intrrrroducing.... "G", 3/4 time-sig, 3 notes - lovely touch Ms. Sarah Watts!)
Stripy Cat Crawl (Liz & I's performance of this 2-noted tune, "B"&"A"again, dedicated to the GORGEOUS Billy & the equally GORGEOUS Quaver [my cat in Scotland])
Mr Cool (forming a quartet with the addition of the note "C". Optional vocals provided by the one and only Ms. Liiiiiiz Booth!)
and we were mid-way through our second or third run at
Kim's Ballad (renamed K.M.'s ballad for our purposes)
- when all those within a 20-mile radius were saved by the bell - the doorbell to be precise!

Imogen's lesson over (she's very good - tuned her own violin for the first time today, think her pitch is just as good as mine - maybe she should impersonate me in the Grade-1-attempt!) and Liz & I went off to Herga Music in Wealdstone to get Liz her Grade-1-a-thon repertoire - for timpani & tuned percussion!

How exciting is that!!!!!!!!
well, I think it is anyway. Her first lesson is going to be with Jenny P on Tuesday - I reckon she's going to be the best-taught candidate ever presented for a percussion Grade 1 exam!

While we were there it'd have been silly not to poke around in the saxophone shelves (I wanted something that would help me when I'm practising to build up a tone), so I ended up augmenting my sax-dots collection with the following august publications;

Jazz from the Beginning - simple studies for Jazz beginners (Paul Harvey)
with stuff about articulation etc, simple little pointers at the top of each study. Nice little book - wish there was a version for my violin pupils too.

Progressive Jazz Studies (Easy Level) (James Rae)
Easy being slightly harder than I'm at at the moment, but easier than some of the Grade 1 stuff!

Junior Musical Postcards (Mike Mowers)
world music for beginners - except the Junior version's even simpler than the original "Musocal Postcards". World music's good for getting used to playing intervals that don't come up often in western music, and is a nice 'different' thing to practise too! It's got some duets & a playalong cd too :)

good eh?
add those onto the ones I mentioned before, and to the one I forgot to mention - Sophie's "Learn as You Play Saxophone" (which she used to start with) and I've practically got a library! well, a very small bijoux one at any rate!

Came back & did some more l-o-n-g notes, then had a go at the first of Mr.Harvey's offerings - entitled "In the Bag" in reference to the three notes it uses. It's got a good variety of simple articulations - accents, stacattos, slurs, legatos - and it's quite fun, especially if you swing the quavers.

I'd have blogged a bit earlier on, but I fell asleep & didn't even wake up in time to get to George's birthday party, which is a shame :( .
Still, at least I didn't miss work.

One of the notes I played in my later practise sounded a little bit like a saxophone - prrrrrrogress!

"By perseverance the snail reached the ark."

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

preacher (1834 - 1892)