Category: alto saxophone

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David Sanborn – J.T.

Continuing through the Close-Up album, this is track #2: JT.

This is probably one of the hardest tracks on the album for me to play. There’s a ton of tricky altissimo passages that are right in the break between F-A (the hardest range for me to navigate fluidly).

This month has been a busy one for me, making it hard for me to hit my self-defined goal of posting one transcription per week. I did these Sanborn transcriptions back in High School (with pencil and paper!) Given my limited time, I quickly keyed them in to Finale, played through once or twice to fix the most egregious errors and then rolled tape.

The quality of the transcriptions that I did back then doesn’t meet my current bar for quality. I neglected to put in chord changes, I didn’t transcribe all the way to the end of the fade (I think I stopped when I got to the end of the page!), and there are occasionally multiple parts being played simultaneously that I didn’t capture. Not to mention little inaccuracies with notes and rhythms that I didn’t catch until playing them a few times.

I might need to do a ‘Take 2’ pass of these when I get more time. I could only find my written transcriptions for the first half of the album, so the second half will have to all be done from scratch. Hopefully you will notice an improvement in quality as I go!

David Sanborn - JT

 

Enjoy!

@SDartSax

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David Sanborn – Lesley Ann

Continuing through the Close-Up album, this is track #3 Lesley Ann. A really beautiful track with a soaring melody. There’s not a lot of soloing to this one, just melody, but it’s one of my favorite tracks from the album.

A brief editorial note – You may catch a small overdub in the video. As much as I try to get everything in one take, I don’t always have the time for that. Sometimes I’ll record longer or more difficult pieces in sections and choose the best takes for each section. In this case, there were no breaks in the track, and I blew one altissimo passage late in the track. So I grabbed the audio from another take to patch it up. But there are a few bars where the audio and video don’t line up well 🙂

David Sanborn - Lesley Ann

 

Enjoy!

@SDartSax

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David Sanborn – Slam

A few weeks ago, I was reading a discussion on Facebook where someone asked what the best David Sanborn album was. They weren’t looking for the best solo, the best track, or an album that contained a few great tracks and a few filler ones. They wanted to know what people thought the best overall end-to-end album was. And the overwhelming majority said ‘Close Up’. I couldn’t agree more!

The production values sound a little dated now, but the playing is amazing. Whenever Marcus Miller is involved, you know it’s going to be good.

When I was in high school, I transcribed most of this album, and it’s how I learned altissimo on the alto. Since reading that discussion thread, I’ve gone back through my archives and dug up those old transcriptions. They needed a little work to get up to snuff (and so do my altissimo chops!)

Slam is the first cut of the album. The melody is simple yet powerful. You need a lot of air to deliver it with conviction the way Sanborn does. This track has some really crazy high parts that I’m not quite solid on, but I did my best.

Hopefully by the time I get around to posting all the tracks from this album, I’ll have a much better handle on the upper register of my alto with this new mouthpiece!

David Sanborn - Slam

 

Enjoy!

@SdartSax

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Maceo Parker – Hamp’s Boogie Woogie

I don’t think I’ve posted anything from the Mo’ Roots album. I look at this as a transitional album for Maceo, where he was really starting to establish himself as a solo artist. More importantly, it’s pretty much a straight ahead jazz album. I feel as though he was trying to expand people’s thinking about what kind of music he was capable of.

This is a very straight forward tune – a hard-swinging version of the classic Lionel Hampton big band song from the forties. Maceo himself was still a toddler when this song was popular, but he does a great rendition here.

Maceo Parker - Hamp's Boogie Woogie

 

Enjoy!

@SdartSax

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Maceo Parker – Do You Love Me?

It’s been too long since I’ve posted any Maceo, so let’s get back to it! This is a great track – the thing that I like about it is how much of a ‘latin’ feel the melody would have if you just changed up the rhythm section a bit.

The solo is not very technical, but it is trickier to play than it sounds. There are a lot of really intricate rhythms, so I recommend listening to it a lot before playing it and maybe even learning to sing it first.

The PDF has the roadmap for the whole track, including the solo trading at the end. The video fades out the long vocal stretches so you don’t have to watch me dance :p

Maceo Parker - Do You Love Me

 

Enjoy!

@SdartSax

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Bill Bergman – You Belong to the City

We lost another great recently. This time Glenn Frey. He is most famous for his work with the Eagles, but he also had a successful solo career in the 80’s while the Eagles were broken up. If you haven’t watched the Eagles documentary, stop what you’re doing and watch it. It’s three hours long, but the opening scene where the band warms up their vocals on “Seven Bridges Road” is amazing. I’ll always remember Glenn Frey talking about how he learned the craft of songwriting. He lived above Jackson Browne, and heard him get up every morning and work through every detail of “Doctor My Eyes” on the piano until it was perfect. Over and over. Glenn Frey summed up “the secret” as elbow grease, and it’s the truth.

I grew up listening mainly to jazz music, so I wasn’t a big Eagles fan until much later in life. But you couldn’t escape the sound of Miami Vice in the 1980’s, and this song featured prominently on it’s soundtrack. So this is a song that I heard a great many times on television and radio growing up. It’s a classic pop sax anthem, and another guilty pleasure to transcribe and play!

The sax player is Bill Bergman, one of those killer players who you’ve heard everywhere, but you may not know their name or work. I didn’t realize that he’s a fellow Strokeland recording artist, both as a member of Jack Mack and the Heart Attacks, but also as a solo artist. I found a great video of Bill telling the story behind this recording.

There’s not a lot of soloing in this track. The signature lick is the three-note opening line: a half-step down followed by a major third. The melody is built around that motif. But there are some nice pop licks thrown in for good measure. There are simple chord changes throughout, but I lazily just called it all C#-7 in the PDF. This one is all about the sound – sing it out!

There are a bunch of sax solos in the genre that I’ll continue to work up over the coming months.

Bill Bergman - You Belong to the City

 

Enjoy!

@SDartSax

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Don Myrick – One More Night

More Don Myrick! Why not? This track is perhaps his most well known work among the general populace. After all, this reached #1 on the pop charts, and had a music video that Don appeared in.

There was a lot of saxophone in pop music in the 80s, which made it a great time to be a player. Even though I was heads-down on jazz 95% of the time, it was a nice feeling seeing your instrument enjoy a prominent place in pop culture and the music industry in general.

So I have a soft spot for these sorts of solos, even though they aren’t in my wheelhouse of jazz/funk. They’re not super meaty, but they are a fun, guilty pleasure to play. Expect more to come!

This song is a ballad, which always makes the transcription tougher. I obsess over the rhythm trying to notate it as accurately as possible. The solo has a very rubato feel overall, so it’s best to listen and try to feel it as much as possible. Above all else, solos like this are a great way to work on your sound. Listen to how Don sells every note. Beautiful!

Don Myrick - One More Night

 

Enjoy!

@SdartSax

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Don Myrick – After the Love Has Gone

We lost another music legend this week. This time, Maurice White, the founder of the band Earth, Wind & Fire. The impact that he has had on the music industry is immeasurable. He created so many classic songs that will live forever. In over 10+ years of playing with Doctorfunk, we’ve hardly played a gig that didn’t have at least one EWF song in the set list. They are definitely in the top five all-time great horn bands.

So when I heard of Maurice’s passing, I did what I always do: I listened. Then I got out my horn to play. I’ve had Don Myrick on my to-do list for a while now, so I figured there was no better time than today to tackle his most iconic solo.

And what a solo! Although the track is considered one of the ‘smoother’ songs in the EWF catalog, the Alto solo is anything but smooth. It’s only 24 bars long, but it’s filled with meaty bebop-inspired lines that are quite challenging to play. Picking them out of the lush mix was no small feat either! But it was worth it in the end to me, I can finally cross this song off of my bucket list!

I’l have more Don Myrick in the future as well – what an inspiration!

RIP Maurice, you’ll be missed…

Don Myrick - After the Love is Gone

 

Enjoy!

@SdartSax

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Cannonball Adderley – Del Sasser

I found out recently that Hal Leonard has published a Cannonball Adderley Omnibook. I always get excited about new transcription books, especially when they are done really well, and/or are about an artist that I’m really into. This definitely fits both of those categories.

I literally wore out my Charlie Parker omnibook in high school. Decades went by with no more saxophone ‘omnibooks’ until the excellent John Coltrane Omnibook arrived in 2013.

So I ordered my Cannonball Omnibook the minute I heard about it. While I was waiting for it to arrive, I figured I’d might as well dust off one of my old transcriptions! I went back through my college notebooks and found Del Sasser. Ironically, it’s not from the same recording that the Omnibook selected, so you know that I didn’t just plagiarize it!

I transcribed this back in college as part of a class assignment for jazz theory. We had to pick a solo, transcribe it, write it out, learn to play it, analyze it, etc. All pretty straightforward. The kicker was that we had to play the transcription with a live rhythm section. But that’s a story for another day…

Cannonball Adderley - Del Sasser

 

Enjoy!

@SdartSax

P.S. Do you like the new background color?

 

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Kenny Garrett – Amandla

Well, I didn’t finish off this album in 2015 like I had hoped, but maybe with a little luck I’ll finish it in January of 2016!

Believe it or not, this is probably one of the hardest solo transcriptions I’ve ever done. Much of the track has a ‘half-time’ feel that floats. There’s nothing to grab on to, but the time is there – rock solid. It’s a brilliant arrangement!

This is one of those situations where you don’t really appreciate the track until you transcribe it and really have to dig in to what’s going on. The changes on this song are so beautiful, and the feel that is created by the rhythm section is so amazing.

I did my best to capture what I felt was going on time-wise, but I’m sure others might have a different interpretation. If so, I’d love to hear it! For a change, my performance of the solo was based more on feel than on reading the rhythms strictly (and I still didn’t get close enough for my taste).

But check this track out – Kenny’s playing is amazing, with some beautiful lines and rhythms. The PDF starts with his main solo, and continues through the end of the track. After the piano solo, he fills in around the melody as Miles plays, and then trades with Miles as the tune rides out. can you imagine trading with Miles Davis??

Kenny Garrett - Amandla

 

Enjoy!

@SdartSax

P.S. My first post with the new Alto mouthpiece!