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Saxophone Articulation And Phrasing

4K views 5 replies 6 participants last post by  skeller047 
#1 ·
Dear Members Of The SaxOnThe Web Forum,

First of all I hope you all are good in your lives.

I have been into jazz articulation and phrasing on my alto sax nowadays. And I'd like to ask you guys and gals which books and players in the jazz era should I listened to in order to gather to perfect my jazz articulation overall?

First come to my mind in bebop era sax players are Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley, Jackie McLean, Johnny Griffin, Charlie Mariano and who else.. could you please enlighten me about more players if I may ask please?

Other than that, any supplements that could help me to improve my tonguing, articulation and phrasing?

Best Regards

:treble:
 
#3 ·
The only suggestion I have to make is to take one recommendation with a grain of salt. There is a common thing in jazz pedagogy of tonguing every other note on the off- beats - in other words, slurring two notes together but it's the second eighth in the beat and the first eighth in the next beat that are slurred together. I can always tell the students of teachers who espouse this as the one true way to articulate strings of eighth notes, because it sounds disjointed, un-rhythmic, and just generally like poop. Reference is often made to Cannonball Adderley, as in "this is the way Cannon articulated". Now when I listen to Cannon playing, first off I rarely hear long strings of eighth notes anyway; he changes things up a lot. And honestly what I hear in Cannon's playing is a lot of breath accents but definitely not this ta-ya ta-ya ta-ya thing they are imposing on all the students.

So if you hear that recommendation, I would nod and say "yes, yes"; maybe even do some practicing that way (it never hurts to have some more articulation tricks in your bag) but don't just sit there and play long strings of eighths going ya ta-ya ta-ya ta-ya ta.
 
#6 ·
It's all over the map. Tongue eighth notes from the off-beat, that works well - lots of people do that, but the trick is to use a legato tongue when playing this way. Don't hit the reed too hard during long 8th note passages. Some players, depending on tempo, will tongue EVERY note in an 8th-note passage - Dexter Gordon does this a lot, as do many other players of that time, though the champion of this technique, in my opinion, is Sal Nistico. He may be double tonguing on some faster passages.

I don't think there is any one type of articulation that you can study and then say "That's jazz articulation!". It's really more of a "jazz feel" thing, and the only way to learn it is through listening and transcription. How much to swing 8th notes (it's not always triplets), how to accent, how to get "in the groove", etc., these are the things that you have to learn.
 
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