I bought a tenor but I haven't dedicated the time to it, plus I haven't found a mouthpiece that I like as of yet. I've been doing a lot of mouthpiece searching for the alto in the last few years and now that that's cooled out maybe I can begin the search for a tenor mouthpiece. After doing it for the alto, I just haven't felt like looking for any more mouthpieces. You play both, right?
Alto (saxophone) is just a very hard instrument; there's so few people that play it really well. I feel it's the best one, too, now. At first I didn't feel that way; I wanted to be a tenor player. It took a long time for me to feel that alto was the most expressive of the saxophones.
The characters created cannot just be a mouthpiece for the writer. When you look at a piece of writing, and it's genuine and it doesn't feel like every character is just a mouthpiece for the writer, but that they've been created in such a way that they're expressing an idea that a writer wants to get across, that's when a story succeeds.
I don't know what I was trying to get out of a tenor - but it never really satisfied me until one day I picked up my alto and I said, 'Where have you been?' and I said right here for now on!
Theo Wanne has done it again!!!!!! He has brought a new dimension in mouthpieces that will not only stand the test of time, but will be a benchmark mouthpiece for many, many years to come! The bar has been raised.
Any time you put on the mouthpiece of somebody that you're not, there's a professional responsibility to get it right. I did a great deal of research in both of those arenas.
Only the French, I guess, really use tenor and alto to any great extent in the orchestra
Only the French, I guess, really use tenor and alto to any great extent in the orchestra.
I think you have to play the game on every level. If you need a friendly, charismatic, good-looking guy to be the mouthpiece, then so be it. And maybe Ralph Nader should just be behind the scenes telling that guy what to say.
Then, of course, I played alto and tenor, wherever there were jobs.
The baritone can serve functions that the alto and tenor cannot, in orchestral voicing
The baritone can serve functions that the alto and tenor cannot, in orchestral voicing.
When I was in grade school and high school, I did a lot of chorale singing. And the chorus would be tenor, bass, and alto and soprano.
I train myself. I don't have trainers who want hundreds of thousands of dollars to train me. I hire who I want to put the grease on my face, to rub my neck and rub my back, to take my mouthpiece out and rinse it off and put the mouthpiece back in. And then I go about my business. And if they want to say something, they can give me little reminders. All you need are reminders. You don't need 'big-time' trainers.
I've been listening to jazzmen, especially saxophonists, since the time of the early Count Basie records, which featured Lester Young. Pres was my first real influence, but the first horn I got was an alto, not a tenor.
Some people be game-goofy and words don't sound right coming out of their mouthpiece. But whenever E-40 says something it's just solidified.
I spent two years in Palo Alto - what an awful, suffocating place for those of us who don't care about yoga, yogurts and start-ups - and now I have moved to Cambridge, MA - which, in many respects, is like Palo Alto but a bit snarkier.