An old adage says that "a picture is worth a thousand words." Let's write a book on the saxophone embouchure by collecting a gallery of famous or not-so-famous saxophone embouchures. Please identify the saxophonist in your image.
To be honest, I could never understand the "scrunched-up-superficial-chin-muscle" approach to the saxo embouchure that most of the pictured artists demonstrate, and why it might be encouraged from a practical standpoint.
I own CDs and/or have repeatedly attended live performances of a majority of these guys and Candy Dulfer, and noticed that only Delangle and Sacawa can tastefully negotiate the low register (listen to ballads and this is extremely evident -- even one of my personal idols Johnny Hodges who is otherwise perfectly beautiful).
In my own practice/performances, I have noticed that I can only be sensitive in the low register if my superficial chin muscle (doctors please help me out with the anatomical term) is totally down and half of my bottom lip is in contact with the reed.
Not to stir the pot, but I also rarely hear performed or recorded examples of these scrunched-chin guys/girls having the flexibility to play the altissimo softly. Can you point me to examples of this that I might have missed?
I don't hear much of a difference in flexibility in the "easy" register (maybe between low D and high F) between "scrunched" and "flat" chin type embouchures, but the low and altissimo registers seem to me to be much more embouchure-sensitive before voicing-sensitive.
I am interested to know of and hear exceptions, for both my own and my students' sakes.
Teal is one school of thought. Joe Allard told me directly that the flat chin idea was not good. He said bunched chin was preferred. This after I had been working for some time with the Teal idea. He literally told me to throw out the Teal book.
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