Tag: blues

Open Mic Adventures LXX: “Moody Noodling”

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

A couple of weeks ago I purchased a Slade saxophone from Amazon.  Amazon is notorious for selling tons of junky Chinese saxophones in garish colors for low prices.  These horns are often barely worth the brass and cork they’re made from, but parents looking for affordable horns for their kids buy them without knowing any better.  The result is typically frustration with the instrument.

Yours portly desperately needed a reliable saxophone for some upcoming gigs, and repairs to my existing saxes (one alto and two tenors) are prohibitively expensive at the moment.  Also, my repair guy is a cantankerous old Northern guy who lives way far out, and the combination of expense, inconvenience, and a Yankee tongue-lashing for not maintaining my horns adequately had yours portly running to the arms of our Chinese overlords.

Well, Slade makes a surprisingly good sax for $230.  Typically these Chinese horns have all sorts of problems:  leaky keys, pads that don’t seal properly, etc.  Horror stories abound of purchases paying the equivalent of the horn’s price (or more!) to get it setup properly.

I decided to bite the bullet and try it after watching a video from Better Sax on YouTube, in which he compared one of the saxes to to his gorgeous (and $4000) Yanagisawa alto:

I ordered the cheapest possible sax, even though I could have spent another $40 or $50 for some cool colors.  When the sax arrive last Tuesday night, I was pleasantly surprised to see they’d sent me the wrong sax—their blue model!  It is an absolutely gorgeous instrument.

Check out that beauty!  Such a beautiful instrument, of course, demands to be played, so I did just that.

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Open Mic Adventures XVI: “Please Come Home for Christmas”

The Portly Politico2 Comments

I finally got around to writing the detailed review (it’s around 2200 words!) of my school’s Christmas Concert this year.  The full review is over at my SubscribeStar page, and includes the video for this performance and “O Holy Night,” which I wrote about last week.  It was a really stellar performance, and I am super proud of the kids.

This week I’m featuring the video of our grand finale, “Please Come Home for Christmas.”  Most readers will be familiar with the version by The Eagles, which was the version my High School Music Ensemble used as its primary reference.  The song goes back to 1961 and Charles Brown, a blues pianist.

It’s also quite challenging, with a lot of secondary dominant chords and a slightly irregular structure.  For example, sometimes students would hang on the B7 chord for four beats before resolving to E major, which shifted after two beats to a delightful E augmented chord.  Other times, though, the B7 would only play for two beats, followed by E major (or E7), before resolving to the tonic, A major.

A number of my private lessons leading up to the concert involved diving into some of the nuances of the piece in more detail (naturally, quite a few of the students enrolled in High School Music Ensemble also take private lessons with me after school).  The barre chords are challenging for guitarists, and the different ways of playing that fun little E augmented chord also provided some educational mischief.  For my bassists, we worked quite a bit on the various walkdowns, such as the opening A->Amaj.7/G#->A7/G sequence.  That’s not hard to play, but there’s a lot a budding young bassist can do with it.

Regardless, as you’ll hear, this piece brought the house down, and the young man singing it was a hero the rest of the day—I heard him greeted to wild applause and cheers upon arriving to his first period class after the morning concert.  The video here is from the same mother who took the “O Holy Night” video, so if you see her lingering on a particular guitarist/bassist for an extended period of time, that’s why.

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