My friend Stefan rigged an old bari sax to shoot five feet of propane-fueled flame from the bell! This video of a test run is making it’s rounds on the internet: Check out Stefan’s account at Introducing: The Flame-O-Phone!.

Here’s a roughly-edited sampling of sax clips from last Saturday night’s BlackTails gig at The Puck:

We sold out the joint and made a lot of friends. It was definitely a party. A word about The Puck. It’s a really awesome venue. They are super nice there and take really good care of the performers. And my favorite part is they have a wide variety of non-alcoholic drinks like Izze soda, Jones juices, and Honest Tea. How often do you see that at a bar? Never. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it in a venue like this. Best of all, they had my favorite drink of all time: Honest Tea Peach Oo-La-Long!

On a technical note… I tried several open-source video editors in Linux (Ubuntu 9.04), including OpenShot, LiVES, Cinelerra and PiTiVi. However, the only one I could get to work was Kino. Basic, but splices and dices nicely.

This is a fun clip of an impromptu jam that broke out after our gig last Friday. The whole gig was a bit like this, featuring live musicians jamming with a DJ. Half the band has put its instruments away by the time we did this, though, and the DJ is holding the camera. I wish we had some footage or recordings of the rest of the show, though. There were some really cool moments, including a groove that I couldn’t resist laying some Interstellar Space over! And it worked, and people dug it!

P.S. Yes, it’s that time of year…

Jaleel Shaw just posted a link on the Facebook to Michael Brecker playing Oleo, and that led to the mother lode of Michael Brecker transcriptions:

http://www.michaelbreckerliverecordings.com/transcriptions.html

Check out the whole site, maintained by saxophonist Louis Gerrits, obviously fanatic enough to build this wonderful catalogue.

I miss Michael Brecker. It’s not right that he’s gone.

A while back, Russ sent me this video (audio really) of Chris Potter playing All the Things You Are at a master class. It is mind blowing, and I’ve recently come back to it to work out what I can on my tenor:

Today, Stef sent me a link to Ben Doherty’s transcription posted by David Valdez:

Potter’s solo version of All the Things You Are

If you click ‘download’ below the viewer, you’ll get a link to the PDF file. Better for printing.

This material is worthy of serious study, and probably will induce serious frustration! Thanks to all, and most importantly, Chris Potter for musical inspiration.

I was at Roberto’s Woodwinds today to pick up some V16 soprano reeds.  An employee told me they no longer carry Vandoren reeds.  The reason given was that they were "expensive and inconsistent".

Correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t reeds always been expensive and inconsistent!?

I suspect there’s more to the story than that.  But it doesn’t matter.  I can buy Vandoren elsewhere.

I use V16 on soprano and alto.  I like the extra bite I get in my sound with them.  Of course, these are secondary voices for me, so I’m not as particular about quality issues.  I pretty much play through every reed in the box.

On tenor, however, I’m neurotically fussy.  Rigotti Gold reeds have been the only brand that performs to my liking for several years now.  Roberto’s is the sole distributor for those.

So for now, I have to make two stops to pick up my reeds, not just one.

I finally got around to installing software on my digital audio workstation today.  The machine, cobbled together from old parts, is an Athlon XP 2600+ with 512MB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive.  It’s dual booting Microsoft Windows XP SP2 and Ubuntu 8.10.  I usually have it running in Ubuntu as my media server and, when I upgrade the RAM, a VMware server for development projects.  The only reason I have Windows on it is to run Cakewalk Sonar 6, which I picked up on the cheap at the CompUSA fire sale a little while back.  Now I finally have a dedicated environment for audio software only, which prevents a lot of configuration headaches.

Anyway, when I got Sonar fired up, I dug around for some old project files.  That’s when I discovered this home recording from 1997.  This is a spontaneous improvisation between myself and Stephen Mazzetta on guitar.  Originally recorded with some crappy dynamic mics and a Gravis Ultrasound card, I did what I could to make it presentable:

Smaz Blues 

This is from the same home recording sessions that produced the Flam and Mars Walk takes on my audio page. There’s more, too. It’s fun listening to this stuff twelve years later!

WARNING: I just crackled and peeled the lacquer on my Yanagisawa S991 while doing this! It wasn’t even directly in the steam. I guess they don’t make lacquer like they used to. I’m kind of pissed, but whatever. So my horn doesn’t look brand new anymore…you can’t tell from more than two feet away. I figured I’d warn everybody before they take a chance with their horn.

Thanks to Pete Thomas’s Saxophone Repairs page, I learned how to fix something that’s peeved me for decades! I thought I’d post it here for any of you saxophonists who are tired of wrapping paper around your neck cork in order for your mouthpiece to fit. I usually just have my repair guy recork the neck now and then. In this case, the Lawton mouthpiece I got for my tenor was a little looser than my Link, so I’d been wrapping a bit of painter’s tape around the cork. Well, guess what? You can expand the compressed cork by holding and rotating it in the steam from a tea kettle! I could actually see the cork expanding. It was a little uneven and lumpy, but no matter. Oh, Pete’s site also mentioned an alternative method of wetting the cork and holding it well above a gas flame. I don’t recommend this approach! I thought I was holding it well above the flame, but I still managed to burn some of the cork. If you don’t have a tea kettle, buy one! Tea is a lovely beverage.

DISCLAIMER: I’m pretty good at tinkering with my saxophone. You might suck at it. If you botch a repair, it’s not my fault, okay?