SOAPBOX: The day the music died

By D.L. Johnson • July 10, 2009

When I first came to the Monterey Bay area 24 years ago, every high school and middle school had a music program. Some were stronger in concert band, marching band, choir, orchestra or jazz band/choir, but all had some unique strength about their music program.

The other night I attended the local end-of-year dinner meeting of the Central Coast Section of the California Music Educators Association. I was a couple of minutes late and walked into what is usually a high-energy meeting. Instead, I discovered the opposite. Here were some of the most powerful educators I had ever known sitting in a quiet and somber mood. I also noticed many whom I thought would be there, were not. Why?

Here was a meeting where music teachers could unwind and excitedly talk to people who truly understood their incredible accomplishments. Instead they were wondering where the future was going to lead them.

Shockingly, several announced they had suddenly been laid off. For others, their programs were so severely cut back and/or changed to the point where they were being assigned impossible tasks for the next year’s school season. In several school districts, there will be no music education for any of the children. These were not new educators but pioneers in music education in the Monterey Bay area and the state.

Instead of doing the usual introductions and talking about the upcoming fall school year, we were asked to tell everyone what bad things had happened to our programs.

Several small school districts laid off all their music teachers. Larger school districts announced cutting their music staffs in half, and then telling the remaining staff members they would fill in the gaps.

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Here are two great websites to find transcriptions, both for Bb and Eb:

This guy is an incredible player and an incredible transcriber!
Charles McNeal

More solos-

Sax Solos.com

Some great Parker licks, in all keys!

Tim Price

And here are some Bb (tenor or soprano saxophone) books to get:
John Coltrane Solos (Saxophone / Tenor Saxophone) - Artist Transcriptions

Get Lester Young here:

The Lester Young Collection: Tenor Saxophone

Here is a great place to find Fred Hess, a former instructor of mine. His transcriptions of Pres and Hawk are definitive.
Fred Hess

At the risk of cheesing out, I love Grover Washington Jr. He was smooth when there was no smooth. Its a guilty secret!

Best of Grover Washington, Jr.: Note-for-Note Saxophone Transcriptions

Having said that, I also think that Sonny Stitt doesn’t get enough props for his genius. His solos and phrasing just make sense.

The Sonny Stitt Collection: Tenor Saxophone Artist Transcriptions

Improvised Tenor Saxophone Solos

Add Stan Getz to your list. I like to try and play the transcriptions along with the artist. Emulate the sound and phrasing when possible.

Stan Getz - Bb Tenor Saxophone

I know there are many other books, many other transcriptions. As always, when working on solos (AS WITH ANYTHING) set the metronome to a slow tempo and work your way up. There is no better way to infuse your saxophone playing with the jazz vocabulary than to get the feel from the masters. Remember: if playing the saxophone was easy, everyone would be doing it! Peace.

Jason Justice

They exhibit the same pattern of brain activity as adults listening to an unexpectedly disrupted rhythm, which could be a clue to the nature of the human relationship to music.

“We’re interested in finding out what the origins of music could be,” said Henkjan Honing, head of the University of Amsterdam’s Music Cognition Group. “Is music just a side effect of language?”

The ability to follow a beat is called beat induction. Neither chimpanzees nor bonobos — our closest primate relatives — are capable of beat induction, which is considered both a uniquely human trait and a cognitive building block of music.

Researchers have debated whether this is inborn or learned during the few first months of life, calibrated by the rocking arms and lullabies of parents. This question in turn touches on the nature of music: whether it’s an innate human ability, or — as neuroscientists like Steven Pinker have suggested — an offshoot of language, an “auditory cheesecake.”

If beat induction is present at birth, perhaps music is its own reward.

“We hear music, we clap along. Music becomes faster or slower, and we can dance to it,” said Honing, lead author of the study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We have evidence for the first time that it’s active at birth, not learned.”

Honing’s team attached an electroencephalogram — a machine that measures general levels of brain activity — to 14 two- and three-day-old babies, then played a rock beat composed of a high hat, snare and bass drums.

Immediately after each beat, the babies’ brain activity increased. After several repetitions, the researchers dropped the bass from every fourth beat. (To hear what the babies heard, click here.) The babies’ brains showed a momentary disturbance, known as a mismatch negativity, that is experienced by adults when expected stimuli fail to occur.

“You can see in the brains of these babies that they expect something to happen, and it doesn’t,” said Honing.

Though beat induction probably helps people time interactions during conversation, he said, the ability’s origins are likely disconnected from language.

“The regularity is hardly ever found there,” he said. “The pulse is defined in most music, but you hardly ever find it in language.”

McMaster University auditory development specialist Laurel Trainor agreed with Honing that beat induction underlies musical rather than linguistic faculties, but cautioned that it could still be learned — albeit much earlier than expected.

But whether in our hearts or learned from a mother’s heart, beat induction’s musical essence raises questions about the purpose of music.

Perhaps, write Honing and colleagues, musical capacity provides some as-yet-unidentified evolutionary advantage, with the ability to process it a basic part of humanity’s biological heritage.

“I’d be very intrigued to go one step up and see if babies are also sensitive to meter, as opposed to only beat induction,” he said. “I’d like to see if they can appreciate the difference between a 2/4 and 4/4 beat, or a march and a waltz.”

Citation: “Newborn infants detect the beat in music.” By Istvan Winkler, Gabor P. Haden, Olivia Ladinig, Istvan Sziller, and Henkjan Honing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, No. 4, Jan. 26, 2009.

We then combined it with the recording and POW there was some music happening. We will all get a chance to try this in our next lessons but let me suggest that you try it first without the recording. Play the different scales associated with Freddie, but don’t just play the scale up and down. Play different combination’s of the notes in different octaves. Don’t stray outside of the notes in the scale! And try it with the minor blues scale as well. Lets get the blues, but in a positive way. And don’t let your tone suffer as you practice this. Remember to keep those collective chins up.

Peace- Jason

Peace!- Jason

Embouchure- Building stamina and muscle tone

Tone- What I call “getting the waiver out of the sound” Focused, clean tone

Focus- Not to get too outside of the box, but when these are done at the very beginning of the practice session, and played at pp, p, or mp, they serve as a way to center and calm yourself. Almost like, dare I say it, meditation. Clearing the mind and getting ready for the task at hand is very important and good for any age, any level player.

I have number of students who had a tremendous scoop in his attack. Long tones fixed it. Tim Price has great long tone exercises on his website. I have some as well on my downloads page One other thing is I recommend doing these exercise without vibrato. There are other exercises to focus on those.

Even if you only has three minutes to do these exercises (as I lay out in a video on my site) these can be the most crucial three minutes off the practice session. My teacher, Mark Harris, roughly outlined the two schools of thought in saxophone playing years ago. The French School, playing low Bb ppp and in control. And the American school, higher, faster, louder. Long tones at pianissimo gives us a platform to live inside of both schools without contradiction!

Happy Playing!