Such has been my obsession with saxophone practise over the past few months that I’ve badly neglected my blog, so here I am with a new post…about my obsession with saxophone practise.
Obsession
I’ve been working in Edinburgh since March, and the main benefit has been that I’ve had time to practise the sax almost every day, for one or two hours. Some of you may remember my burning enthusiasm in March last year, which died because owing to awkward circumstances I couldn’t feed it. This time I’ve kept it well stoked. Soon after I took out my horn again I felt the familiar old obsessiveness begin to consume me, and part of me worried that it was just another example of starting something I couldn’t finish. But I’m pleased to say that the obsessiveness has been the sustained boost I’ve needed to get things going. Even if my enthusiasm sometimes declines, I know that I’ve now got the momentum to keep on going until it returns.
This happened recently.
I couldn’t really practise very much on our visit to Canada recently (watch this space for stuff on that amazing trip), and I seemed to be feeling my obsessiveness more when I thought about canoeing than when I thought about practising. Back in Edinburgh I couldn’t get back into my former mode. All I wanted to do was drink and smoke and read sci-fi and laze about. But I think there was more to it than simple laziness. At the beginning of the Canada trip I read Improvisation: It’s Nature and Practice in Music, by Derek Bailey, and I found it profoundly thought-provoking. I cannot follow Bailey all the way to his extreme ideological position, but there is much in what he and his interviewees say that I agree with and which I found inspiring, surprising and even unsettling. He calls into question some elements of my approach, and seems almost to be trying to expose music teaching, in both jazz and classical music, as a self-serving anti-musical conspiracy. I found this all very liberating, but perhaps too liberating. With some of my practise techniques called into question, I felt that my practising had lost some its value, that some of my work was pointless or counterproductive. Given all this maybe you can appreciate that I didn’t want to practise when I got back from holiday.
Incidentally, one very definite effect of reading that book was to turn me off the idea of studying composition, but there have been other reasons for that, including the complete nonresponsiveness of the Open College of the Arts, who advertise a three-step Composing Music program, one course per year, the aim of the third course being the production of a major piece of music, with the guidance of a personal tutor, who is a professional composer. I’m still considering it, but I reckon with a big keyboard and some books I could just teach myself.
Anyway, last week my sax obsession returned, after practising a new scale pattern. Sometimes it only takes a little thing like that to relight your fire.
And I’m happy to discover that I’ve got parallel obsessions (if that’s not an exaggeration or an impossibility): I’ve still got fires burning for canoeing and hillwalking. Maybe I’ve found a balance? I had a conversation about this a few years ago with my good friend Paul Keir. Agreeing that it’s not productive to always skip from one obsessive interest to the next, we came to the conclusion that what we needed in our lives was balance. I don’t know how much he would agree, but I think Paul has now managed to achieve a large measure of this balance in his life.
New Sax
Several weeks before leaving for Canada I bought a new sax, the culmination of weeks of increasingly intense GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome), the symptoms of which included drooling over pictures of the Cannonball Big Bell, the Keilwerth Shadow, Berg Larsen metal mouthpieces, and (the shame!) Rovner ligatures.
Now that I think about it, it was the new sax that initially took the edge off my obsession, because it took a lot of getting used to. I sounded worse for a while and it was very depressing, because I felt rather lost, not knowing if it was me or the instrument. As it turned out it was me, of course, a happy result given all the hard-earned cash I’d spent. It was an embouchure problem, which I’ve been fixing since, and now that I’ve got used to the instrument it’s really showing its worth, and I’ve gradually fallen in love with it. It’s a Yamaha 875 Custom, made around 2004. Very shiny.
I recorded a little piece when I was in Canada, with Laura’s-sister-Jeannie’s-husband-Richard, as I’m obliged to call him (it’s just “Richard” to most other people.) He’s a good musician and songwriter (and lead guitarist in the band Mr Completely), and he was able to accommodate my musical inadequacies. He put the drums in and played the keyboard, creating an eastern-sounding context within which I could improvise. The soloing is very basic, fragmented and far too tame, but I was pleased to hear that my tone is roughly what I’ve been aiming for. I’ll post it up here soon.
Lastly, thanks must go to my sax teacher Chez Taylor for the valuable guidance – just being able to spend time with an accomplished player of the same instrument is a wonderful experience; and most of all to Laura, for the endless encouragement – it really makes a difference.
Stuff can get in the way of great ambition. It can often feel like your in a canoe, paddling like mad but the currents keep moving you in the wrong direction. It can be good when striving for balance to learn when to just ride the wave, when to drop the fishing line and when to use all your will and energy to get to where your going. Each stage of the process is just as good as the others.
I see it like this: When your riding the wave your listening to music and learning about sound. When you drop the line: Your thinking about music and sound and composing your personal groove and style. And when your paddling like mad: You are practising what you have been forming in the previous two. Balance will never be your problem, allowing to accept the process of things will perhaps be the bigger challenge.
I am certain with every breathe you take you are working towards your goals and will most definitely be a huge success. .
“Keep on tooting” – Music man!!