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Harrisonburg, Virginia, United States
Professor of Saxophone, James Madison University

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Beyond Boundaries: The Creative Saxophonist

(This article originally appeared in Saxophone Today, January/February 2014.)


Beyond Boundaries:  The Creative Saxophonist

            “Are you a classical saxophonist who plays jazz, or a jazz saxophonist who plays classical?”  Every time someone asks me this after a performance, I get that feeling of deep satisfaction that can only come from a job well done.  The very fact that someone would feel the need to ask this question indicates that I have performed at high enough level to obscure any hint of favoring one style over the other.  This is not an accident, but rather the result of many years of hard work.  I have never been terribly interested in being a “crossover” artist, as this implies that there are distinct boundaries that must be crossed.  Lines in the sand serve only to separate, no matter how often we cross over them.  The purpose of this column is to explore creative approaches to our instrument and to eliminate any imagined limitations.  The labels “jazzer” and even worse, “legit,” (my least favorite stylistic reference ever) will have no place here.  This will be about making music, pure and simple.

What Are You?

When an earnest audience member asks me the classical-jazz question, I never give them an answer that fully satisfies them.  They seem to desperately want me to pick a side.  But I have never met a pianist and felt compelled to ask, “So, are you a Classical pianist or a Romantic pianist?”  Imagine asking a clarinetist if they only played Mozart, or were they really a Poulenc clarinetist!  The idea that you could only do one or the other is silly.  Obviously, musicians will have specialties, but having a certain expertise does not automatically preclude ability in other areas.  Our tendency to compartmentalize music could be a result of our human predilection for sorting things (give some blocks of different shapes and colors to a toddler and see what happens . . .), or perhaps it is the lingering influence of record companies and radio stations, narrowly defining music so that they might have an easier time selling it to us.  We have even managed to take styles like fusion and world music and dilute them into bland, tasteless versions of the artistic adventures that accidentally created their respective genres in the first place.  I’m fairly sure that most music fuses elements from different sources, and it is all certainly from somewhere in the world!

I have been blessed with certain professional advantages that have allowed me to pursue music in my own unique way.  Academia provides an environment that encourages risk taking in the name of preserving culture and promoting art.  I do not rely on commercial success to feed my family, at least not in the same way that a full-time artist must sell CDs and concert tickets to survive.   I am free to pursue music that I find interesting and worthy of study, regardless of whether or not it can generate a profit.  I also have the unique position of teaching, and therefore studying, the gamut of repertoire for the saxophone.  By design, my job allows me to explore music, to invent and to interpret.  I am grateful for these opportunities, and it is a privilege for me to share my work with you.

The story of how I became a saxophone professor has a few twists and turns, unexpected even to myself.  When I was a child, I was exposed to all sorts of music.  Two of my favorite recordings were Heifetz’s RCA “Living Stereo” Tchaikovsky violin concerto, and a Miles Davis album called “Jazz Track,” which included a side of the “Kind of Blue” band (that album is now known as “The ’58 Session” and is included with the alternate material on “Kind of Blue.”)  In retrospect, those two LPs really formed the musical foundation of my career.  I learned to value tone quality, melody, technical brilliance, and “vibe.”  Those two records are plentiful in all of those characteristics.  (They are also incredibly well recorded, which might explain my audiophilia, but that is for a future column.)

Heifetz (and other shredders)

After a few years of playing a cheap electric organ by ear, and then learning the flute in school band, I finally moved over to the saxophone at age thirteen.  I practiced a lot.  I played along with the radio.  I recorded pop songs onto cassette tapes and learned all the saxophone solos.  I played along with Coltrane and Clarence Clemmons.  I also loved the guitar shredders of the 1980s, and I played along with Steve Vai and Joe Satriani.  There was never a point where I drew a line in my mind between Jascha Heifetz and Eddie Van Halen.  I just wanted to be able to play everything that I liked.  To be honest, there wasn’t much music that I didn’t like.  My first big stadium concert experience was Grover Washington, and my second was YES.  It was just music.  Great music.  It wasn’t until I went to college, and started hanging around with serious musicians, that I started forming opinions on what I disliked.  Admittedly, many of my proclaimed dislikes had more to do with appearing cool than anything else.  At a certain level of musical maturity, we form our own opinions, but this takes time and experience.  In those middle years, we tend to adopt the opinions of people that we respect, or our friends whom we are trying to impress.  I don’t really get the thrill from Grover that I used to, but he gave me a lot of youthful enjoyment and inspiration.  The point here is that if we continue to grow, there will always be some things that we eventually outgrow.  Interestingly, I still love those Heifetz and Miles albums, even after decades of serious study.  Maybe my appreciation for them has actually deepened.  Substance takes time to fully reveal itself.

Remembering John Paynter

Moving forward, I found success as a young jazz musician, but my first deeply emotional experience performing music came when I was sixteen, in the Massachusetts All-State concert band.  We played under the baton of the late John Paynter, legendary Director of Bands at Northwestern University.  We performed Frederic Fennell’s transcription of Wagner’s Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral.  This was the most devastatingly beautiful thing that I had ever performed, and the first time that playing in an ensemble of that size brought tears to my eyes.  Once you have had an experience like that, you will chase after that feeling for the rest of your life; it alters your brain chemistry in a permanent way.  I loved jazz, and my major collegiate studies were in jazz improvisation and composition, but I never stopped studying and performing classical repertoire.  In fact, I took an extra year to complete my undergraduate degree because I spent so much extra time taking classical lessons and performing in concert ensembles and saxophone quartets.  In those early years, I developed an appetite for all kinds of music.  This hunger still burns in my musical belly.

Discovering Ryo Noda

There were a lot of little revelatory moments along the path, but none quite as potent as my first exposure to the music of Ryo Noda.  Improvisation I is a well-known warhorse from the “contemporary” (and I use the quotation marks to indicate my disdain for the use of that label to describe music that is decidedly no longer contemporary) repertoire for unaccompanied saxophone.  Written in 1972, coincidentally the year of my birth and therefore my contemporary (!), Noda drew upon traditional Japanese styles.  The piece contains some graphic notation (such as squiggles to indicate vibrato), pitches that require improvised rhythms, and techniques that include flutter tongue, portamento, and “cutting tone.”  The most glaringly non-traditional aspect to the score is the complete lack of barlines.  If I was intrigued upon hearing the piece in performance, seeing the score made my head explode with possibilities!  I studied the piece, prepared it for my lessons, and I set to composing my own music.  It was around this time that I composed my solo tenor saxophone piece, Soul of the Elephant.  I became increasingly interested in using multiphonics to express harmony, or to enhance melody, rather than to simply act as a noisy effect.  Over time, this kind of performing and composing became a very important part of my life.  I built a reputation for my multiphonic techniques, and saxophonists started performing my compositions.  I had never really intended for any of that to happen – I was only pursuing the music that satisfied my curiosity.  If I became known as “the multiphonic guy,” that was just a good stroke of luck that helped me to launch my career.

Making Music

In the long-term, I never strayed very far from my interest in stylistic hybrids.  For my masters degree recital in jazz composition, I wrote wood flute pieces based on Haiku poetry, an Egyptian-style duo for saxophone and darabuka (goblet drum), and a piece inspired by Jimi Hendrix.  Through all of this, my love for playing and teaching the saxophone continued to grow.  I gradually discovered that teaching classical saxophone was something that I looked forward to more than anything else, and that I had a real knack for helping saxophonists find creative solutions to their problems on the horn.  My inner voice spoke to me, loudly and clearly, that I needed to become a saxophone professor.  Until that point, I had been thinking that I would teach in jazz studies, directing a big band and teaching improvisation.  This required a shift in my efforts, and a serious dedication to learning the traditional repertoire for “classical” saxophone (again, with the snarky quotation marks).  Focusing on that repertoire required tackling my problems head on.  I took everything to a new level, and I have continually renewed my commitment to raising my personal standards on the horn, and in my head.  No matter what I am playing, I strive to play with great tone, intonation, phrasing, and control.  My philosophy is that it doesn’t matter if you are playing a jazz tune, a classical etude, a concerto, or a simple scale: you are either making music, or you aren’t.  I aim to make music, every time.

So, the subject of my column turns out to be inevitable.  I never really understood that there were boundaries between styles, so I simply ignored them.  When I heard my peer jazz students say that they took classical lessons “to build technical chops,” I couldn’t understand why they had such a narrow view of the value of studying concert music.  I was studying to learn as much as possible.  It was, and remains to be, overwhelming at times, but I didn’t feel like I had any choice in the matter.  I often found myself spread too thinly, but I kept working.  The music, by which I mean The Music, took over my life.  I still consider myself to be a student, and the act of sharing my work with my own students constitutes an important part of my teaching.  I try to teach from the body of work that has contributed to my success.  If I am going to teach a methodology, it has to be something that has already worked for me.   This way of teaching can be challenging, and it requires a whole lot of personal practice, trial and error, and humility.  I am willing to change, and to admit that I was wrong.  I think that my students respect me for taking this position, and they appreciate that I talk about their lessons as “our work together.”  I try to take everything that I know about learning to be a good musician and to bring that to the level of each individual student, using the information as a kind of fuel.  A teacher is only a guide; the student must choose the work.  The work is a lonely business, fraught with risk and disappointment.  It is also the thrill of a lifetime.  I constantly remind myself of the fact that I make an excellent living teaching people how to make music with a strange and fragile machine, invented by a nineteenth century eccentric Belgian instrument designer.  Today, the saxophone has risen to essential status at any reasonable conservatory or state school of music, but this was certainly not guaranteed from the beginning.  If my own father had been a musician, he would have had a difficult time finding a university that would have allowed him to study the saxophone as a primary instrument.  A great deal has changed in a single generation, and we are the beneficiaries of the acceptance of our instrument.

  I plan to use this column much in the way that I teach my students.  I will share things that I am currently working on, and I will demonstrate strategies for developing skills that are universal to good music making, regardless of style.  Taking full advantage of the digital format, I will include video, audio, and more.  I hope that you will contact me with your questions and thoughts.  The subject material is purposely broad, with creativity binding it all together.  As the technology grows, I hope that our connection will widen, and deepen.  I am grateful to have this 21st century platform, and I look forward to our work together.  Saxophone Today!

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