With their current promotion, through the Woodwind and the Brasswind, you order a box of your favorite non-Rico clarinet or alto saxophone reeds, and get a free box of the comparable Rico offering. The deal is good through March 7 or while supplies last, so I suggest putting in your monthly (weekly?) reed order today and scoring a free box.
I’m more than happy to try out some new reeds for free, and won’t hesitate to switch if I find them better than what I’m currently using. (*wink*)
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.
For over a decade, all of my solo recital performances have been on multiple woodwind instruments. Last month I performed (twice) a recital program with pieces played on flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and three saxophones. Here are some of the things I do to prepare.
Practice the physical changes. I opened my program with an oboe piece, and followed that with a flute piece with a delicate entrance. As the recital approached, I made sure to follow each oboe practice session by practicing that flute entrance, to be sure I could do it under those conditions. Something that didn’t work very well: after the oboe, flute, and bassoon pieces, my hands and jaw tended to be a little tense for clarinet playing. If I were preparing this recital again, I would bump the clarinet to the end of my practice sessions to work on playing relaxed even when fatigued.
Practice the mental changes. If I can put myself into the right place mentally for the instrument I’m about to play, my physical technique seems to fall into place. Sometimes I will do some rotating warmups—play, for instance, some scales on one instrument, and then immediately play them on another, and another. That gives me a chance to practice shifting mental gears. Once I have my program order set, I also make liberal use of Post-it Notes to give myself reminders between pieces: “take a moment to relax embouchure,” “keep breath support strong in low register,” “clear moisture from octave vent.”
Make thorough checklists. With seven instruments on my most recent recital, I surely would have forgotten something—a bassoon seat strap, a case of clarinet reeds, a piece of sheet music. I made a detailed list and used it to set up for a dress rehearsal. Sure enough, there were a few things that hadn’t made it onto the list, and I was able to retrieve those items and add them to the list before the first public performance. When I traveled a few hours for another performance, I was confident that I had everything I needed.
Use good stands. Good ones are sturdy and make it easy to set down or pick up an instrument without fuss. Since I played flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon on the first half without leaving the stage, having some good stands kept things moving smoothly and let me stay focused.
Do thorough warmups. As the performance approaches, it’s tempting to practice in panic mode, and skip over things like warmups. I always play much better if I do my warmups faithfully all the way up to the day of the performance. I find that if I warm up slowly and thoroughly on each instrument before the performance (this might take a few hours with multiple instruments! I usually do it in the morning), then I’m able to switch between them more easily.
The most important rhythmic concept in jazz is swing, an intentional unevenness of note lengths. In jazz swing, downbeat notes (and rests) are long, and upbeats are shorter and later. This phenomenon isn’t represented well by classical musical notation, but sometimes it is approximated like this:
Or like this:
The examples assign the downbeat notes a length exactly 2 times that of the upbeat notes—the triplet quarter note is twice as long as the triplet eighth, or, in other words, the swing ratio is 2:1.
The debate over swing ratios
The triplet method of explaining swing rhythm is unpopular with many jazz musicians and educators, who insist that a triplet-like 2:1 ratio is incorrect. Most of them, if pressed, are unable to provide a better ratio or formula. Instead they insist on the importance of listening to jazz to aurally absorb the “correct” ratio (or system of ratios, perhaps varying with tempo), or propose that swing can only properly be “felt” rather than explained.
There are a number of things that these musicians and educators are correct about: a triplety ratio isn’t necessarily correct, and listening is important.
What these otherwise fine folks sometimes get wrong is the idea that swing can’t be measured or analyzed. In fact, it has been extensively measured and analyzed by a number of scholars, and some useful generalizations can be made. (If you want to dig into the research, an excellent place to start is the article “Preferred swing ratio in jazz as a function of tempo” by Anders Friberg and Andreas Sundström, published in TMH-QPSR, volume 38, no. 4, 1997.)
Some helpful swing generalizations
In general, yes, a swing ratio of 2:1, triplet-style, works fine for many situations, particularly at moderate tempos.
It’s fairly common for swing ratios to increase (something like 2.5:1 or even higher) at slower tempos. A higher ratio could be described as “swinging harder.”
It’s also common for swing ratios to get lower at faster tempos (like 1.5:1). This could be described as “not swinging as hard” or maybe playing “straighter.”
However, jazz performers’ ratios vary, depending on factors that are perhaps best summarized as “personal taste.” And, yes, the best way to develop this informed taste is by listening to and internalizing a lot of great jazz.
It might be helpful for classically-trained musicians to consider how they interpret something like a grace note—its individual placement, length, emphasis, etc. depend on many factors, and a “swung” eighth note’s interpretation is similarly complex.
Federal judge and oboist Diane Wood is reportedly under consideration to fill a Supreme Court vacancy.
Wood has demonstrated a willingness to challenge her fellow jurists without offending, say lawyers and clerks who have observed her in court. Those attributes may be an asset as President Barack Obama considers her to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens on an often-divided U.S. Supreme Court…
Wood, 59, who plays oboe in the Chicago Bar Association Symphony Orchestra, was one of four people interviewed by Obama last year before he picked Sotomayor.
To my own amazement, this blog is rapidly approaching its 15-year anniversary later this month, May 24th. (Some of the content is dated at even older than 15 years, because I wrote it before starting the blog and retroactively turned it into blog posts.)
If you like, send me question(s) about whatever you want, about woodwind playing, doubling, blogging, teaching, or whatever. You can remain anonymous if you like. If it makes sense to do so based on the responses, I’ll answer them in one or more blog posts starting on about the 24th. If the response is low or the questions are not particularly of interest to my audience at large, I’ll answer as many as I can privately.
One of the questions I get most frequently from aspiring woodwind doublers is “Which instrument should I learn next?”
The short answer is “Whichever you want.” Woodwind doublers’ motivations (career, artistic, or personal) are varied, and your interests and goals should override any advice I (or anyone) can offer. If you really want to learn to play a certain instrument, then no need to read further—that’s the one you should tackle next. And if you don’t feel motivated about a certain instrument, then your chances of success aren’t good.
But many of the doublers I hear from have designs on picking up several instruments over the long term, and are just looking for advice to maximize some aspect of their current careers:
Employability
If your goal is to get as many doubling gigs as possible, then there are some relatively common combinations of instruments that are used for musical theater, jazz big bands, and other commercial-type live-performance situations. (If you play another combination, then there are probably still opportunities out there if you find them or make them yourself.) Some of the common ones are:
Flute, clarinet, and saxophone. For jazz situations, you need good saxophone chops coupled with a good grasp of jazz style and possibly improvisation. If doubling is required, it will almost always be C flute, B-flat clarinet, or both, and often the bar isn’t terribly high on these. For theater, you will find that the weighting depends on the show and the book; often the Reed 1 and Reed 2 books both call for flute, clarinet, and saxophone, but Reed 1 might have the lead flute parts and solos, and Reed 2 is the lead/solo clarinet part. If it’s a jazz-heavy musical, then either part might call for orchestral-type soloing on flute or clarinet, plus demand convincing lead alto saxophone playing. Theater books are also likely to call for doubling on “secondary” instruments like piccolo, E-flat clarinet, and soprano saxophone.
Low reeds. In a jazz big band, this means primarily baritone saxophone with some bass clarinet (and occasionally B-flat clarinet and/or flute). For theater, a more “classical” show will likely be bassoon-heavy, with bass clarinet and baritone saxophone doubles; a jazzy show will lean toward baritone saxophone and bass clarinet with less (or no) bassoon. Bass saxophone and contrabass clarinets occasionally appear as well; most smart arrangers will provide ossia lines to enable covering these on more standard instruments.
Oboe specialist. This surprising combination shows up in many musicals: oboe, sometimes with English horn, plus B-flat clarinet and tenor saxophone. Generally the oboe and English horn parts call for a soloist-level player, with little more than inner harmonies on the single reed instruments.
