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The Last Sax Key Study

March 17, 2015
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saxophone key study 031715

My friend, the poet Victoria H. (the H is silent), kindly loaned me a saxophone she had at her house. It helped, getting my hands on a real sax and pressing some of the keys. With a photo source, you’re not quite sure what’s going on, especially with such a complex mechanism. The pads, and pad stops, and keys, seem to be of arbitrarily different sizes in the photos. Now the saxophone is coming to life in my mind.

No more detail studies for this project! It’s the whole sax, or no sax at all. 🙂

Kenny Barron(s) and a Sax Section

March 17, 2015
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I’d just finished the Stan Getz bio, and, looking for more Getz/Saxism, I looked on the magazine rack of the Burton Barr Phoenix Public Library where I’d returned the book (STAN GETZ: A LIFE IN JAZZ) for Down Beat Magazine. I found it, except its name is jam-sessioned into DownBeat. But lo and behold, KENNY BARRON was on the cover!! Stan Getz called him “The other half of my heart.” Another bonus was that there was an ad for a new cleaning system for musical instruments that involves light, and the photo of the sax on the ad was in gorgeous detail. So I thank the magazine and the LIGHT folks for the photo springboards, and ask them to please not sue nor cease&desist me.

Here’s what happened:

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Learning the Saxophone, part 5 (ambience)

March 4, 2015
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Here is a new drawing, a work in progress. For the first time there is a real effort to put some of the keys and rods where they belong–to learn how things work together. There’s also “post-production” work with the tablet’s photoeditor, experimenting with selective focus and “mood lighting.” All of this is in the service of making the final drawing of the series more genuine, and all that jazz.

Learning the Saxophone (part 1)

February 23, 2015
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For reasons that will be explained in a future post, I’ve begun to be immersed in the world of jazz, focusing on the tenor saxophone. The above title refers to a VISUAL learning, and not learning to play, though I’ve got a little background in clarinet and have sometimes daydreamed about taking up the sax.

At any rate, though I am lightyears from knowing this marvelously-shaped instrument, I have started seeing saxophones where there are none, in the shape of streetlights, swans from the neck up, and playground slides. My goal is to be able to draw a convincing tenor sax from various angles without having to rely on a photo source. To that end, I’ve done a lot of looking and a little sketching, as revealed here . . .

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