Maestro Perry Robinson, Rest In Peace 9/17/38-12/2/18 2018 was a very difficult year for me personally, frankly the most difficult of my life. My mom passed away due to complications from heart surgery on June 2nd, 2018. It is only now that I’m starting to fully...
Warne Marsh was a highly developed, thoughtful and masterful improviser that has been under appreciated, infrequently recognized and often maligned. His music has always been a source of inspiration to me, and I'm very fortunate to have studied with him briefly and spent some time...
My attraction to New Orleans clarinet started in earnest when I took my first trip to New Orleans for the 1985 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fair, or what they call down there Jazz Fest, which is short for Jazz Festival, obviously. On this trip...
Master Clarinetist Buddy DeFranco took the clarinet in many interesting and varied directions in his long career. While I plan to write several detailed blog posts about his work, and to include several of my personal transcriptions in them, I would like to offer this...
I was fortunate to grow up a block away from one of the historically most significant golf courses in the world, Pasatiempo Golf Club, in Santa Cruz California, which was designed by the one and only Dr. Alister MacKenzie. http://www.pasatiempo.com/ From a very early age, probably around...
What an amazing musician Cuban saxophonist/clarinetist Paquito D'Rivera is, and what a truly brave and courageous life he has lived. While there is a bit more to be learned about the man here at his Wikipedia site, I suspect we know very little about the...
Alto saxophonist Phil Woods spent his entire life and career pursuing jazz with a passion entirely informed by the saxophone greats that came before him. An outgoing and opinionated man to the core, Phil Woods never shied away from any opportunity to express himself. His...
Writing and performing alternate melodies, sometimes referred to as contrafacts, over a jazz standard chord progression, is a common practice amongst jazz musicians. I was surprised to see that Wikipedia has an entry for this……https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrafact. Here is their definition….."In jazz education, a contrafact is a musical composition consisting of a...
Saxophone Essentials Volume 1 I began putting together my Saxophone Essentials teaching material over a decade ago. After some fifteen or more years of teaching to that point I became convinced that a good deal of the commercially available saxophone material was rather poorly conceived. I...
When Kenny Garrett plays the alto saxophone, the Saxophone God’s smile broadly. Kenny conjures up the spirits of all the great alto saxophonists before him, and continually reinvents his own voice to fit the context. Bird, Gary Bartz, Sonny Stitt and Cannonball Adderley all find...