Monday

On Monday I had a half hour of long tones getting the intonation of the altissimo down.

Then I had some people not show for a recital rehearsal and so I had an hour of scales. In the scales I am attempting to rectify any and all issues I have with my technical requirements that I need to get done by the end of the week. I've had a lot of troubles with scales in 4ths and 5ths, just keeping the correct interval on the descending line. In the 3rds I've had troubles only around the break of the register. The BCD region of the instrument. I've also got an issue with the Ab minors in 3rds, and the Eb minors, its a problem with the damn Gb. I've spent my whole life understanding the enharmonic spelling of notes, and always go from F# to Gb or whatever the note is very easily. But I've always seen Gb and said to myself F#, I've always seen A# and told myself to play a Bb. Which is causing some confusion when I go to play stuff that has these slight enharmonic differences. The problem being my theoretical knowledge of scales tells me immediately that an Eb harmonic minor scale is Eb, F, Gb, Ab, Bb, Cb, D, Eb while my fingers tell me Eb, F, F#, Ab, Bb, B, D, Eb. So something to work on, getting my brain and fingers working better together.

I then had a 2 hour ensemble class when I did some playing of a great tune by Tom Fawcett and John Milton (watch those names!).

I then spent 2 hours playing through the play a longs of my 20 rep tunes. I found that some melodies I still haven't memorised, being most of them actually. I can play them fine, but not from memory. I noticed that the first couple of choruses I improvised over where a little bit sketchy, but in most cases by the end of the play a long I felt harmonically secure and having fun with the changes. Obviously this wasn't the case for some of the harder songs like Oleo, Confirmation and Miss jones.

I then looked at the troubling keys of my Hi-Fly transcription the keys of E, F# and G. Still lots of issues, for E its mostly the range, lots of Altissimo stuff.

I then spent a whole hour getting my Dexter Gordon Confirmation and Kenny's Miss Jones up to speed. Made some changes to both transcriptions. Feeling pretty steady about both songs and playing them with the CD. having a lot of fun playing Dexter's solo in the actual range getting a lot of his wicked phat vibrato tone.

I spent about 30 minutes running through some lines I'm trying to memorise in 12 keys. struggling with it all.