Tag: original composition

Open Mic Adventures CXLVIII: “Funky Sax II”

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Pickup my newest releases, Säx and Electrock III: Euroclydon!  Get 50% off with promo code storm.  That’s 50% off ANYTHING and EVERYTHING on my Bandcamp page, including the album, full discography purchases, merch, etc.!

Want to play the sax?  Read my ultimate guide to getting started for under $350.

With even more apologies to Ponty—don’t worry, mate, I’ll have more shorts of me playing piano and hamming it up for the camera next week (I think)—I’m sharing an old original composition this week, “Funky Sax II” from Electrock III: Euroclydon (50% off with promo code “storm”).  Like last week’s piece, I think this one dates back to Fall 2004, when I was in a saxophone sextet at the University of South Carolina.

I don’t have access to score for this piece anymore, but it’s either a saxophone quintet or sextet.

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Open Mic Adventures CXLVII: “Funky Sax I”

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Pickup my newest releases, Säx and Electrock III: Euroclydon!  Get 50% off with promo code storm.  That’s 50% off ANYTHING and EVERYTHING on my Bandcamp page, including the album, full discography purchases, merch, etc.!

Want to play the sax?  Read my ultimate guide to getting started for under $350.

With apologies to Ponty—don’t worry, mate, I’ll have more shorts of me playing piano and hamming it up for the camera soon—I’m sharing an old original composition this week, “Funky Sax I” from Electrock III: Euroclydon (50% off with promo code “storm”).  I think this piece dates back to Fall 2004, when I was in a saxophone sextet at the University of South Carolina.

I don’t have access to score for this piece anymore, just the MIDI file, and I can’t remember if I wrote this for six saxes (soprano, two altos, two tenors, and baritone) or fewer, so I’m not exactly sure, but it has the hallmark of my college era material for saxes:  funk, blues scales, countermelodies, etc.  As far as I know, my college saxophone sextet never played this piece, but it would be fun for a sax ensemble to try.

Regardless, I slapped together a video for the piece late Sunday night (I actually uploaded it to YouTube while drifting off to sleep) and here is the glorious result:

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Open Mic Adventures XCV: “Akhenaten”

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Yours portly released a new album earlier this summer, Heptadic Structure.  It’s an exploration of pieces in 7/4, 7/8, and 7/16 time.  Each piece is twenty-one written measures, for a total of 147 measures across the seven pieces.  Also, 14+7=21.  Math is fun!

You can listen to and/or purchase the album at the following links:

This week I’m featuring the final track from that album, and my second favorite after “Balladic Processional“:  the experimental tone poem “Akhenaten“:

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Open Mic Adventures LXXXII: “Brown Friar”

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Well, just like with Lazy Sunday, I was off on my Roman numeral numbering for Open Mic Adventures.  Fortunately, it’s just by one, but I made the mistake somewhere around the fortieth-odd post, so, like with Lazy Sunday, I’m just going to start the correct numbering back with this post.  As such, there’ll be two posts with “LXXXII” in their titles, but the list of “Other Editions of Open Mic Adventures” below has been corrected.  Goodness!

Regardless, today’s track is from my seventeenth album, Four Mages—the last one I have yet to feature here.  It is a collection of ten electronic tracks, all but one of which (“The Blind Prophet“) is color-coded. Each piece explores some facet of fantasy archetypes, weaving and casting a musical spell upon listeners.

Here are some platforms where you can listen:

I really enjoy this album, and I hope you will, too.  It’s about fourteen minutes in length, so it’s perfect listening for doing a short errand or for a quick drive.

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Open Mic Adventures LXXI: “Epistemology”

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Last Friday, 1 March 2024, I released Epistemology, my latest collection of original compositions.  I personally think it’s some of the best of my newer works.

You can listen to and/or purchase Epistemology through the following services (and more!):

This week, I thought I’d feature the title track of this epic release.

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Open Mic Adventures LXX: “Moody Noodling”

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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 LXVII: “Ode Napoléon”

The Portly Politico3 Comments

Late last year I started working on a longer work about Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.  I’d seen Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (2023), and while the film is riddled with inaccuracies, I still found it immensely enjoyable and fascinating.  I also find Napoleon fascinating as an historical figure, as did the leading philosophers of the nineteenth century.  How could his shadow not loom large on European and world history?

So I set about composing “Ode Napoléon“—one of the longer works I’ve composed in some time.

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Open Mic Adventures LIX: “Listless Chorale”

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Okay, I’ll admit—this week’s Open Mic Adventure is a bit of filler.  Even the best albums have some filler, right?

I really have been trying to up the content game a bit lately, but in an effort to work ahead on the blog a bit, I’m digging deep into some compositions that are really more exercises for me than intended for general consumption.

Still, I thought this piece would give a bit of an insight into how I go about composing, specifically when I write chorales.  I like to try to challenge myself to link together a single note across multiple measures in one or two of the voices, morphing the other voices around those pedal tones.  The challenge comes in trying to find chords that fit these pedal points.

“Listless Chorale” is one such attempt.  I’ll confess, I’m not totally pleased with the outcome—thus the “listless” in the title, as it feels like it’s not really moving anywhere—but you might find some beauty in its harmonies.

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