Description
The Saxophonist’s Journey and CHOPS are offered here as a bundle at a savings of $5.
The Saxophonist’s Journey: An Inclusive Pedagogy for the 21st Century Description:
The Saxophonist’s Journey is four collegiate saxophone professors (and members of the Moanin’ Frogs) answer to what it means to study music in today’s vastly polystylistic and interconnected world. The saxophone has thrived in every style of music from bebop to neo-romanticism to carnatic to norteño to bluegrass to klezmer and more. The joy of being a saxophonist is that the saxophone, perhaps more than any other wind instrument, is able to access all of the musical languages we love with great flexibility and ease. The authors realized that many of the beloved resources we used on our own journeys left us to figure out the initial steps of accessing those languages on our own. We created The Saxophonist’s Journey to support you on your path and share a resource with you that we wish we had in our formative years.
In this book, the authors Eddie Goodman, Jonathan Hulting Cohen, Jeffery Siegfried, and Jordan VanHemert support the development of the whole musician, wherever they are on their musical journey. This book covers a myriad of topics, some useful to musicians of all instruments and others specific to saxophonists. These include physical, mental and emotional awareness, mouthpiece and other embouchure exercises, long tones, rhythm and meter exercises, vibrato practice, guides for the practice room, public speaking from the stage, career advice, and approaches to interpreting repertoire, etudes and jazz and commercial music that center analysis, mindfulness, and deep listening. The authors encourage you to choose the path that best supports as many of your interests as time will allow. In doing so, we hope that the message of our pedagogy will be clear: the saxophone of the 21st century is an instrument that allows you to engage critically, respectfully and with integrity the many worlds of music, finding the beautiful, creative intersection of who you are and the lineages of people, places, and times that brought that music to us today. With the skills in this book and the ones you develop on your own, you will create your own worlds of music, on your own terms, with the musicians and people you love.
This book features:
Prose descriptions of common issues in saxophone playing including technique, intonation, repertoire, rhythm, time, and tone production to inspire your practice
Techniques for practicing jazz as well as classical music and how to mix multiple genres in your practicing
Classical and jazz articulation exercises
Approaches to playing in ensembles, such as saxophone quartet and the big band saxophone section
Mindfulness exercises using drones and a host of other resources
Discussions of quality equipment and what to look for before switching
Standard, microtonal, and altissimo fingering charts for sopranino through bass saxophones
A progressive list of etudes and their applications
An extensive chapter on public speaking from the stage.
By working through this book in conjunction with the other resources available for saxophone, saxophonists of all levels can enrich their study of music by emphasizing one common element: there is no destination–the joy is in the journey.
CHOPS: 221 Full Range Fundamentals and Technical Exercises for the 21st Century Saxophonist Description:
CHOPS is a complete revision and update to the existing pedagogical materials available for saxophone as pertains to fundamentals and technique. Saxophonists have developed an immensely impressive arsenal of technical abilities as evidenced by the extraordinary demands placed on us by the latest music written for the instrument. There is, however, quite a gap between the demands we see in our repertoire and the demands we see in most of our technical and fundamental methods.
While there have been a number of pedagogical methods that have introduced and detailed various extended techniques, our fundamental books are all written for a saxophone that no longer exists, that being, the saxophone of 2.5 octaves where the altissimo register is treated as if it were yet another extended technique. During my own studies I was frequently encouraged to extend exercises from other methods as well as incorporate similar exercises from other instruments, this book is the result of nearly 20 years doing just that.
A daily warm-up and technical regimen is one of the most necessary parts of serious study of the instrument. By having time each day to address any technical issues while at the same time finding time to extend and develop new skills, the student can free themselves to practice their repertoire without limitations and inhibitions, thus, enabling physical ease and depth of expression. This type of warm-up routine should include some portion of each of the chapters from this book: Long Tones, Mechanism, Voicing Flexibility, Vocalises, Articulation, Scales, Intervals, Arpeggios, and Cool Down Exercises.
Features:
- Several different approaches to long tones included subdivided time, wedge figures, and large leap long tones also featuring vibrato and intonation excerpts.
- Mechanism exercises in the most challenging parts of saxophone register changes.
- New voicing flexibility patterns for developing accuracy and range.
- “Vocalises” as an expressive technical bridge between long tones and technique practice.
- Single, Double, and Triple tongue instruction through the altissimo register
- 3+ Octave Diatonic and Chromatic Scales, Scale Patterns, Intervals, and Arpeggio progressions.
- Cool Down Exercises to finish the practice day.
This is an extensive collection of exercises designed to provide enough new and challenging material to keep the advanced student occupied for many years while introducing new pedagogy never before published for saxophone. By working with this text in manageable amounts, the contemporary saxophonist will continue to push the limits of what is possible on the instrument well into the next century.
