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Easy, boys ...

Selmer Ref54, welcome to SaxOnTheWeb. These really are friendly folks. Just a little rough around the edges I suppose.

Again, where are you located?


Pete, is that a *thing* in Southampton too? I thought it was just SoCal. Hola!


dat
sax
man
 
Is it common to have a sax group? Not that I have been aware of. I had a client through the '90s when I was contracting Design-Build remodeling, high-end estate renovations, cabinet/furniture & millwork installs and other expensive sawdust in Silly-Con Valley. He ran a Intellectual Property law firm who worked with venture capitalist. Nice work if you can get it.

His home and property bordered on David Packard's famous 63 acre Apricot orchard in Los Altos Hills. What a pad! And I'm pretty jaded when it comes to houses... I have built some crazy stuff. My plumber recommended me because I did ultra-clean renovation work in nice homes. So I met the owner and his Wife at 8:30m on a Saturday morning. They had done their homework for me, all the things I wanted to go through to create a Scope of the Work and some kind of Money/Time estimates.

They were very warm and made me feel like they were looking forward to turning plans into reality. With business done he asks me if I like music, or did I like Piano music. I said, I like Jazz for sake of a better word, Chick, McCoy, Bill Evans, Red Garland... Joe Zawinul, uh you know? He looked at me like I fell from space. He turned around and opened a door off the hall into a big room with floor to ceiling glass exterior wall, making the exotic manicured garden feel like it was inside.

Briefly he tells me that he had taken up piano when he turned 40. All that is in the room is a giant Steinway with tho top propped open. He sits down and starts to play diatonic scales with both hands... slow and even like a familiar warm-up. He tells me that he is in a group of pianists in Mt. View who were all different levels and met once a month to perform and critique one another. He mentioned getting ready for competition. He said that it really motivated him meeting other pianists who were years ahead, or still behind where he musicianship-wise.

He started to play some Czerny or Liszt Caprices. That was it for me. His wife graciously grabbed my arm and escorted me out to the hall, closing the door. She began to apologize for her husband's curt manor. She said he had goals of so many hours of practice for each of his two teachers/coaches. He has hard and fast rules about his office contacting him for any reason during the day. If I had and questions or problems going forward where I needed to talk to him... please DON'T... run it by her and she would sort it out for me.

Our work was in another wing of the house for about a month. We used a back gate and never went up to the main house or in front. But we could hear him practicing during the day. An hour on and and hour off. I can't even remember their names anymore, but I think about how focused that guy was all the time.

A sax group sounds like a cool thing. From time to time, I see people posting on craiglsist in search of saxophonists who want to play in quartets. The only thing I can think of that comes close around here, is an all female sax group called the Quadraphones. I'm sure they are on YouTube. Good strong players, legit material, funk, rock, soul and straight ahead jazz.

Hey Referance 54, I think it's cool that you want to play the horn. I appreciate your desire. I studied clarinet as a kid and learned out of the Rubank's Method, Klose and so on. A few years later when I got a tenor, I missed working through method books and etudes. My sax teacher had me memorize all the diatonic patterns, pentatonic, diminished and whole tone patterns for a year instead. Then begin to sequence them. I learned the tenor mechanism away from notation.

It seems like many older people who take up sax, have to learn basic musicianship, theory and how to work the mechanism... all at the same time... then with the goals of improvising too? Good luck on that. You have a huge advantage knowing what you know and have experienced.
 
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