Not. It's among the first things I think about when I practice, as part of practice is listening, analysing.
EDIT: The beginner I'm talking about is someone who is playing songs and improvising. Not the beginner who is learning the first C major scale.
"Have you heard how to make a statue of an elephant? It’s actually pretty simple. You start with a block of marble and carve away everything that’s not an elephant."
Miles Davis supposedly told someone that "the space is more important than the notes".
Unlike a painting a drawing or a graphic image, music can only be perceived in the temporal continuum. It's forcibly a series phenomenon. You can't stop music, even if you hold the sound, because it would be one sound, not music.
So it is, that the answer to many of the beginner's musical problems revolve around the concept of space and how it is occupied. Whether creating a sparse space, like Miles often does, or a crowded freeway of Coltrane's sheets of sound, the space is what makes the music. For an individual instrument, it's a good idea to describe the "occupation" of space as density. Density can be thought of as the number of notes (usually one on sax) and the "attacks", that is, the notes as they appear in time. Aside from the all-important aspects of tone, articulation, intonation, etc., when listening to a saxophone voice, you're hearing this use of space. That space is created by lack of notes.
I once read a reviewer who began his column by saying, "You can always tell how good a band is in the first few bars, by listening to the drummer, because no really good drummer would play with a crappy band." This is a gross over-simplification, but not entirely false. As sax students, we listen to a lot saxophonists. A great place to start listening to space, is with ballads. One of the characteristics that makes a particular player's audible style is that use of space. The notion of space can be applied to the unit of a single measure (or smaller), a structural thing like 4 or 8 bars, or the larger parts, verse, bridge, chorus, etc. Upon reflection, it's actually more personal than the usual sax language of tone and articulation, because everyone starts with pretty much the same toolbox of those.
I tagged this "Beginner", because I think it's being missed by newer players I hear, while the more experienced have mastered space and time by listening or by trial and error. I'm not suggesting that anyone think about something like this while playing. I am suggesting you think about it extensively when listening to the saxophonists you most admire.
Where do they NOT play?
EDIT: The beginner I'm talking about is someone who is playing songs and improvising. Not the beginner who is learning the first C major scale.
"Have you heard how to make a statue of an elephant? It’s actually pretty simple. You start with a block of marble and carve away everything that’s not an elephant."
Miles Davis supposedly told someone that "the space is more important than the notes".
Unlike a painting a drawing or a graphic image, music can only be perceived in the temporal continuum. It's forcibly a series phenomenon. You can't stop music, even if you hold the sound, because it would be one sound, not music.
So it is, that the answer to many of the beginner's musical problems revolve around the concept of space and how it is occupied. Whether creating a sparse space, like Miles often does, or a crowded freeway of Coltrane's sheets of sound, the space is what makes the music. For an individual instrument, it's a good idea to describe the "occupation" of space as density. Density can be thought of as the number of notes (usually one on sax) and the "attacks", that is, the notes as they appear in time. Aside from the all-important aspects of tone, articulation, intonation, etc., when listening to a saxophone voice, you're hearing this use of space. That space is created by lack of notes.
I once read a reviewer who began his column by saying, "You can always tell how good a band is in the first few bars, by listening to the drummer, because no really good drummer would play with a crappy band." This is a gross over-simplification, but not entirely false. As sax students, we listen to a lot saxophonists. A great place to start listening to space, is with ballads. One of the characteristics that makes a particular player's audible style is that use of space. The notion of space can be applied to the unit of a single measure (or smaller), a structural thing like 4 or 8 bars, or the larger parts, verse, bridge, chorus, etc. Upon reflection, it's actually more personal than the usual sax language of tone and articulation, because everyone starts with pretty much the same toolbox of those.
I tagged this "Beginner", because I think it's being missed by newer players I hear, while the more experienced have mastered space and time by listening or by trial and error. I'm not suggesting that anyone think about something like this while playing. I am suggesting you think about it extensively when listening to the saxophonists you most admire.
Where do they NOT play?
Last edited by a moderator:
