Friday, August 19, 2011

Altissimo Demystified

As small continuation on my last post on Altissimo. I found this nice article by
Dr. Dave Camwell originally written for the Saxophone Journal. It contains a huge amount of advice, practice methods and excercises; an excellent read for anyone hoping to improve in this area.

http://tinyurl.com/3ryafv6

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Jalshaghar - Shiva on the mountains

Here is a clip from a recent concert by our world music group Jalshaghar. It was a great gig in Auroville with everyone in top form. Will be posting more clips as they come.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlrK33JwGs

Altissimo

I have been putting quite some work into this in recent months and finally some results were showing - well I had to look up alternate fingerings for notes C and above so something must be moving.

Here are some excellent charts with many alternatives for each notes and even comments regarding suitability for different saxophones:

http://www.wfg.woodwind.org/sax/sax_alt_4.html
http://www.wfg.woodwind.org/sax/sax_alt_5.html

http://www.wfg.woodwind.org/sax/sax_alt_6.html

Update:

Check out http://tamingthesaxophone.com/saxophone-altissimo. An excellent site and useful page not only with fingerings, but tips on how to reach these notes better. Looks like there is alot on this site. I need to look closer.

http://www.saxlessons.com/embouchure-2/the-altissimo-register/ Another good site to be explored.

I found this nice article by Dr. Dave Camwell originally written for the Saxophone Journal. It contains a huge amount of advice, practice methods and excercises; an excellent read for anyone hoping to improve in this area.

http://mattlangley.com/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Altissimo_Article_PDF.pdf

Friday, August 12, 2011

Top Jazz Blogs

You can never have enough Jazz Blogs. Here is a list of top jazz blogs ranked by various means. Unfortunately mine is missing so lets hope that this is remedied over time!

I'm going to have a look at some of them in the next days, and post my findings here regarding the more interesting ones.

http://www.invesp.com/blog-rank/Jazz

Embouchure - shifting the lip

I dont know how many players i asked over the years about this and never got a real answer. How much of the bottom lip do you tuck over the teeth? Why do i see all the modern players with the bottom lip stuck out? There are probably old posts on this very blog about this. Finally some very good answers and explainations from Doron Orenstein and educator George Garzone on the Best Saxophone Website ever.

This website is certainly living up to its name.

http://www.bestsaxophonewebsiteever.com/small-shift-of-the-lip-big-shift-in-the-sound/