Last week I made a big deal about how I’m shifting Open Mic Adventures into New Music Tuesday, and how it’s inaccurate to call these features “Open Mic Adventures” because they’re not really at open mics—blah, blah, blah. All of that is true, but this week, I have a bit of a conundrum: what do I do if I don’t have any new, original music, but have a cover of a song?
Well, my hasty solution is to use the old “Open Mic Adventures” label for those pieces that covers, as 1.) anytime I feature a cover, it’s me playing it, even if it’s not at an open mic night; and 2.) I don’t want to further muddy the waters with some other title, like “Saxophone Covers Tuesday” or whatever. What a nightmare!
So, here’s how it’s going to be going forward:
Any performance that is a cover of someone else’s work will be an Open Mic Adventures
Any live performance will also be an Open Mic Adventures
Any original music—whether electronic or me playing a piece I’ve composed—will fall under the new New Music Tuesday feature
Shew! Hopefully that’s all sorted.
With that tedious business out of the way, let’s get to this week’s piece! A potential client is booking a saxophonist to play the BeBe & CeCe Winans song “I Found Love (Cindy’s Song)” for their wedding. The piece will play as the bride walks down the aisle. At the time of writing, I’m still waiting for the official booking (fingers crossed), but I recorded a quick, abbreviated version of the piece on my alto sax Sunday afternoon [read my full guide on buying a budget sax if you, too, want to start your saxophone empire—TPP].
Here’s my humble attempt at noodling out this smooth gospel/R&B classic:
Want to play the sax like yours portly? Read my ultimate guide to getting started for under $350.
Years ago, my dear mom found a copy of The Usborne Book of Piano Classics (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you) at a book sale and picked it up for me. I have used that book countless times over the years for gigs, piano lessons, practice, arranging, etc. My High School and Middle School Music Ensembles have performed arrangements based on those in the book many times at the annual South Carolina Independent School Association Music Festival.
While it consists of piano arrangements of famous pieces from the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods, I often play the pieces on saxophone. I found myself pulling the book out in preparation for a gig this past Sunday (a wedding proposal—the client’s girlfriend said yes!), and came upon a melancholy piece from the Baroque composer Henry Purcell, “When I am laid in earth,” perhaps better known as “Dido’s Lament.” It’s from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas.
Pick up my newest releases, Electrock III: Euroclydon and Säx, for 50% with promo code storm (promo code is good for any release and works through 1 October 2025).
Another glorious Labor Day has dawned here in the United States. I hate the Communists, but God Bless those red diaper babies for getting us a random day off in September.
This Labor Day is particularly auspicious: I’m releasing two albums today, Electrock III: Euroclydon and Säx. I was hoping to release a third, Ringtone Circus, but my distributor, CD Baby, took issue with the use of the word “Ringtone” in the title. Apparently, that set off some kind of filter against what they call “pre-cut ringtones,” which they do not and will not distribute.
I pointed out that I was using the name euphemistically, and that the pieces are not ringtones, but, alas, I had to change the title of the album and its related track. So now I’ll be releasing the album as Triple Deluxe on Monday, 15 September 2025.
I’m also working on Spooky Season IV, which still has a long way to go before it’s ready for distribution and release. It will likely be my last full-length release for the year, with Leftovers V landing the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Otherwise, I’m not sure what today has in store for yours portly. I do know that the first couple of weeks of school have already kicked my butt (but they’ve been awesome), so I’m hoping to catch up on some rest today. Dr. Fiancée has to work, sadly, but such is residency.
I’m continuing to dig up ancient MIDI compositions (now converted to glorious, lossless WAV files) from twenty years ago (give or take). This weekend I’m sharing some digital saxophone compositions with readers.
I probably intended these pieces to be played by an actual saxophone quartet/quintet/sextet at some point. I played in a saxophone quintet in high school (two altos, two tenors, one bari) and a saxophone sextet in college (I can’t recall the exact instrumentation, but I think it had soprano, two altos, two tenors, and one bari), so I did quite a bit of arranging and composing for those groups. I also arranged a ton for Brass to the Future, the brass quintet (with saxophone) that my brother and I played in for a number of years in the early 2010s.
Now they exist as ghostly digital instruments, honking and squawking through the musical musings of a plump young Portly with a head full of dreams and a belly full of Cheez-Its.
“Saxophonic Organ”
I’m not sure what the original title for this piece was meant to be, but I do remember wanting to emulate the sound and rhythms of a 1970s classic rock organ in the context of a saxophone ensemble. “Saxophonic Organ” is the result of that experimentation, and I rather like it.
Last week I submitted subscribers to Säx, a collection of saxophone quartet pieces I wrote and recorded way back in 2004 in a buddy’s attic studio. In digging around in the vast depths of my backup hard drive, I found quite a few compositions I believed were lost to time (and/or to a 32-bit operating system; my ancient version of Cakewalk 3.0 won’t run on modern, 64-bit operating systems).
Eventually, I’m going to re-release Säx and release these MIDI-based compositions on Bandcamp and on streaming platforms. I managed to convert the MIDI files to lossless WAVs, and I am doctoring some of them up using Audacity. Säx will be released in its original form—what paid subscribers could hear in full last week.
For now, I wanted to share some of the tracks from what will be the MIDI release, as well as a recording of one of the pieces I did on a tiny Yamaha keyboard my family has had since I was a small child (and I still have it—I think it works, too). Paid subs will have access to some other pieces over on SubscribeStar.
The first piece here is “Euroclydon,” named after the Mediterranean storm from the Book of Acts. I remember learning the name from a sermon at my parents’ church years ago, and I am guessing I composed the bulk of “Euroclydon” around 2012:
“Euroclydon”
The next piece is “Aachen Cathedral Chorale.” I used this chord progression and melody in a number of pieces, including my organ solo “Organic Evolution.” I’m sure it’s from some famous Baroque composer, but back in the day, it was one of my favorite themes to incorporate into music.
This version consists of three MIDI files I converted to WAVs and then aligned in Audacity. I also added some additional reverb and chorus effects. Essentially, I had the same theme composed for organ, strings, and saxophones, and then mashed them together into this glorious wall of sound:
“Aachen Cathedral Chorale”
This version of “Aachen” was played using the Yamaha keyboard and splicing/aligning all of the parts together. As I recall, I plugged the keyboard into my older brother’s ancient Crate amplifier, then dangled a primitive computer microphone in front of it and recorded either to Adobe Audition 1.5 or Windows Recorder (the latter would have been a nightmare to line up properly, so I’m thinking it’s the former). I am playing all of the parts on this one:
“Live at the Aachen Cathedral”
It’s wild to think that I wrote some of these pieces as early 2004 or so. I found stuff that I likely composed in high school, which would place the absolute earliest possible compositions at 1999. I was using Cakewalk 3.0 in the eighth grade, so I have some material that would date back to 1998—whoa!
One day I’ll finally figure out how to setup a Windows 95 virtual machine on my desktop so I can run Cakewalk 3.0 natively, but I’ve never had much success doing that.
Regardless, let’s see what else a young Portly cooked up back in the day.
Want to play the sax? Read my ultimate guide to getting started for under $350.
Yours portly is playing saxophone for a client and his wife this evening; the happy couple is celebrating their first anniversary, and the client has booked me to play a song or two as a surprise for his wife.
Naturally, he asked for videos of me playing two pieces so he could get an idea for what he will be getting, and just as naturally, I turned those into YouTube videos for my subscribers.
Now you, my dear readers, will get to hear some sensual, soulful saxophone solos:
I’m a tad late posting today because I was up quite late last night digging through some old computer files. I’ve been cleaning out my Drawer of Forgotten Technology, and stumbled upon my old SanDisk Sansa c250 MP3 player (which I am currently selling on eBay, if anyone wants it). The battery doesn’t hold a charge, but it will play when connected to power directly via its USB cable connected to any charging block that accepts USB. Even more intriguing is that it will interface with a PC when that same cable is connected to a USB port.
I uncovered a treasure-trove of music, basically the stuff I listened to in college and graduate school. Among the random bits of novelty music and 80s hair metal I found a track from long-forgotten musical project, Säx.
Säx was my first attempt at recording anything solo. I’d composed a number of saxophone quartet compositions specifically for me to record them. Each piece consisted of two alto sax and two tenor sax parts, and ran the gamut from blues to gospel to rock to circus music—pretty much anything I could think of to demonstrate my composing skills.
I recorded Säx in 2004 at a friend’s house. He was learning audio engineering at the time (and I believe he now does it for a living), so he was willing to record me and mix my tracks for free so he could get the experience. We were both 19 at the time, and home from our first year of college, and it was a period in my life when everything seemed possible.
To put things into perspective, this pre-dated YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, etc. Getting music out there still pretty much meant burning CDs on your computer, then distributing those in jewel cases with homemade art to your friends and family. You could get them done professionally, but as possible as everything seemed at 19, yours portly didn’t have the money to make everything possible.
Säx was fun, though. I remember my buddy and I in his little attic space, which he had refurbished into a tiny recording studio, figuring out how to get the click tracks at the right tempo. There was one piece, an Irish jig in 6/8 time, that I just could not get down, so we axed it entirely (I love 6/8, but back then, I struggled with figuring out whether to set the metronome to duple or sextuple, something that seems laughably embarrassing to me now).
These recordings are not great, with the exception of “Middle Class White Kid Blues,” which actually came out pretty nicely:
The other recordings are a pretty good example of my composing chops at the time (which, I think, were not that bad; I can definitely hear my influences in these pieces, and composing elements I still use to this day, nearly twenty years later). My playing is often sloppy, with lots of intonation and pitching issues. Some of the examples are really bad—I end one of the pieces on what should be a beautiful chord, but it’s nasty thanks to bad tuning and intonation. But it’s still fun—albeit a bit cringe-inducing—to go back and listen to these pieces.
I’ll be re-releasing Säx at some point on Bandcamp and, ultimately, various streaming platforms, just for the completionists out there who want to hear everything I have ever recorded (I also uncovered some other synthesizer pieces I played and recorded in college under two project names, “Blasphemy’s Belt” and “Fat Guy in Boxer Shorts”; I’ll be releasing those pieces at a future date, too).
For now, my faithful paying subscribers are going to have access to all seven Säx tracks in existence—whether you like it or not! Enjoy this glimpse into some of my earliest recordings.
Pickup my newest release: The Galactic Menagerie! Use promo code obesekangaroos to take an additional 20% off all purchases on Bandcamp! Code expires at 11:59 PM UTC on Friday, 4 April 2025.
Want to play the sax? Read my ultimate guide to getting started for under $350.
Wanna be utterly perplexed while laughing uproariously? Grab a copy of my first book, The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link, so I’ll receive a portion of any purchase made through that link, at no additional cost to you—plus I’ll get the book royalties).
I’ve been engaged in quite a few cultural endeavors lately, and this week my students have their big Spring Concert. So I thought I’d look back at some culture posts from this past week:
Pickup my newest release: The Galactic Menagerie! Use promo code obesekangaroos to take an additional 20% off all purchases on Bandcamp! Code expires at 11:59 PM UTC on Friday, 4 April 2025.
Want to play the sax? Read my ultimate guide to getting started for under $350.
I had a little sax gig up in North Carolina last night, so I’ve been playing more than usual lately. I’ve been very pleased with my beautiful Slade alto saxophone, which I purchased last year (that link is an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that and other links, at no additional cost to you). It has a few small intonation issues, but otherwise is plays beautifully. I’ve really been pleased with the smooth, bright, clear tone I get from the horn.
As such, I thought I’d take a look back at some of my saxophone-related posts:
“Short Sax Starter Pack Recommendation” – my detailed guide to purchasing a decent sax and all necessary accoutrements for under $350. It’s also riddled with Amazon Affiliate links—mwahahahahaha!
Yours portly has an out-of-town gig tomorrow night for a private party in Wilmington, North Carolina. I’ll be playing a mix of French and modern pieces on my alto saxophone.
Naturally, I have spent some spare time this week after school and lessons and practicing. One of my recent favorite Romantic Era pieces is Alexander Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dance No. 1,” from his opera Prince Igor.
I made a small recording and uploaded it to YouTube:
The Portly Politico 