The Saxophonist’s Journey: An Inclusive Pedagogy for the 21st Century

Description The Saxophonist’s Journey is four collegiate saxophone professors (and members of the Moanin’ Frogs) answer to what it means to study music in today’s vastly polystylistic and interconnected world. The saxophone has thrived in every style of music from bebop to neo-romanticism to carnatic to norteño to bluegrass to klezmer and more. The joy of being a saxophonist is that the saxophone, perhaps more than any other wind instrument, is able to access all of the musical languages we love with great flexibility and ease. The authors realized that many of the beloved resources we used on our own journeys left us to figure out the initial steps of accessing those languages on our own. We created The Saxophonist’s Journey to support you on your path and share a resource with you that we wish we had in our formative years. In this book, the authors Eddie Goodman, Jonathan Hulting Cohen, Jeffery Siegfried, and Jordan VanHemert support the development of the whole musician, wherever they are on their musical journey. This book covers a myriad of topics, some useful to musicians of all instruments and others specific to saxophonists. These include physical, mental and emotional awareness, mouthpiece and other embouchure exercises, long tones, rhythm and meter exercises, vibrato practice, guides for the practice room, public speaking from the stage, career advice, and approaches to interpreting repertoire, etudes and jazz and commercial music that center analysis, mindfulness, and deep listening. The authors encourage you to choose the path that best supports as many of your interests as time will allow. In doing so, we hope that the message of our pedagogy will be clear: the saxophone of the 21st century is an instrument that allows you to engage critically, respectfully and with integrity the many worlds of music, finding the beautiful, creative intersection of who you are and the lineages of people, places, and times that brought that music to us today. With the skills in this book and the ones you develop on your own, you will create your own worlds of music, on your own terms, with the musicians and people you love. This book features: Prose descriptions of common issues in saxophone playing including technique, intonation, repertoire, rhythm, time, and tone production to inspire your practice Techniques for practicing jazz as well as classical music and how to mix multiple genres in your practicing Classical and jazz articulation exercises Approaches to playing in ensembles, such as saxophone quartet and the big band saxophone section Mindfulness exercises using drones and a host of other resources Discussions of quality equipment and what to look for before switching Standard, microtonal, and altissimo fingering charts for sopranino through bass saxophones A progressive list of etudes and their applications An extensive chapter on public speaking from the stage. By working through this book in conjunction with the other resources available for saxophone, saxophonists of all levels can enrich their study of music by emphasizing one common element: there is no destination–the joy is in the journey.