Jazz Articulation For Saxophone Part 1.

[Music] this next thing I'm going to talk about is so fantastically important because it is one of those key identifying traits of someone's playing that lets me as a listener know that this person doesn't really know what they're doing and it has to do with turning and articulation around at the middle D because that note has its own type of articulation his own type of pop to it people will have a tendency to want to reverse the articulation pattern around when they get to that note this doesn't really happen as much with classical saxophonist because so much of the articulations are notated but when it comes to jazz playing there's ways that you want to start practicing that can start to erase these horrible tendencies that you can very easily develop when playing with a jazz articulation alright so okay ladies and gentlemen so for whatever saxophone you're playing play your E flat scale alright so there's two scales I'm going to show you because each one of these scales actually puts the articulation of the D in a different place one has an accent and the other one does not okay so let's first go over the a flat major scale up to the knife giving us our eighth note balanced scale and then back down and remember do not articulate the first note okay one of the things you're going to notice is that when you approach the D from the bottom up you have less Keys pressed so pressing the keys gives that D an inherent pop or it gives it its own articulation you want to mentally bypass that and only focus on your tongue articulation that inherent pop is probably what's throwing you off with reversing the articulation on the way down you already have a bunch of keys pressed so you don't get that pop of air giving it its own type of articulation alright let's do that one more time and remember breath attack the first note then the second way we want to do this is to play our E flat bebop scale alright this puts the articulation of the D in a different place remember breath attack the first note remember to do that slowly and steadily obviously you want to go through the entire range of the horn and every key making sure that you are much more aware of that inherent air pop that happens with that D and you bypass it up here make sure that is a tongue articulation where it's supposed to be okay when you're playing jazz lines you are not just playing a melodic line you are also playing the chord changes and there's ways that we can do that the obvious way is to just arpeggiate a chord but we can play the chords with our melodic line our articulation being in the right place helps to reinforce what the chords are if your articulation is off you will essentially be playing the wrong chord through your melodic line I've spoken about this before in different videos how you can play all the right notes and have it still sound wrong how is that possible because if your articulation is wrong you're actually playing the wrong chord over the chord we want to make sure that we're playing the right chord when we are playing the scale and we do that by our choice of articulation pattern let me give you an example this is going to be an F major 6 chord breath attack playing this chord my articulation outlines the structure of that chord by articulating every other note remember don't articulate the first note so by choosing a particular articulation we are playing the chord that's very important okay I want to bring up a very important topic and it's when you play all the right notes but it still sounds wrong how in the world does that happen it happens because we use the wrong articulation our articulation as a jazz musician outlines the chord that supports it and if the notes that you outline with your articulation are wrong you are essentially playing the wrong chord with the scale that you're using let me give you an example I'm going to play this F major be-bop scale with a backwards articulation all the right notes but it sounds weird should sound like this we're gonna breath attack the first note the unaccented notes are the chord tones that should match the chord that I'm outlining in that case it's okay if I articulate that backwards over an F major chord what I'm actually playing is this over and a major chord I'm playing a diminished scale over an F major chord and yeah it sounds weird that's why it sounds wrong when you're playing all the right notes is still the same notes but our articulation is so fantastically important when we're playing jazz that we absolutely need to make sure that we're not doing that wrong take a listen to me articulating it wrong but over the correct chord which is a diminished chord and then take a listen to me articulating it the correct way over the correct chord which is a major six core check to sell [Music] now articulating the scale with every other note in this fashion it's a very very mechanical thing to do Charlie Parker would take it and invert it and he'd move it a little bit forward moving backwards he just went nuts with that thing but you can still hear the outline of the changes if you took the entire rhythm section away which is why it's so powerful he was able to just manipulate it this way okay so we want to get really really familiar with playing articulation in this way until it just starts to become second nature and then we want to start transcribing I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to transcribe transcribe the stuff that you hear somebody doing that is the most fantastic and the most interesting to you because that's what you're gonna be driven by that's gonna be your guide post and you cannot do this enough trust me to this day I'm still transcribing some stuff that's just absolutely amazing like Cannonball Adderley solo on Limehouse blues is just oh it's from another planet-- man Wow okay now just like playing a chromatic scale over a chord can wash out its harmonic relevance we can wind up doing the same thing with our articulation we can wash out the harmonic importance by not articulating anything or by over articulating if I just tongue every single note or if I just slur every single note we can kind of start to wash out the relevancy of how important the chords are by putting those accents there we can assign that rhythm and we can assign value to the harmony so obviously there has to be some type of in between this happy marriage of the two that allows your listener and yourself obviously I'm able to successfully outline the structure of these chords there are certain things that happen in jazz almost all the time that you should be aware of and then it will help guide you along so like at the end of a triplet phrase that ends on like a solid note afterwards like butta butta pop uh triple it BAM like that top note that final note after the triplet is almost always articulated with a very hard accent okay all right I want to play this phrase for you and I'm gonna not articulate it and then I'm gonna articulate it but it's very strong in its harmonic Direction very very powerful stuff alright check this out okay it's very simple but now I want to bop that thing up I want to add some bebop color and some character to it so maybe I play it like this alright that's a little more interesting but now I'm gonna play that and I'm gonna use a very particular type of articulation see if you can hear it so the third way that I play it I'm really putting an emphasis in certain places let me over do it this time to really bring it out [Music] no-no-no by doing that I'm really reinforcing the direction of where that line is going so now as a listener you are anticipating the resolution of that line this happens in jazz all the time and because of its improv is Ettore nature I have the liberty of being able to reverse and switch articulations around at liberty to really emphasize what point I'm trying to make musically alright ladies and gentlemen that's all I got for you I'm working on a long tones video that's gonna be my next one that's gonna come up pretty soon so thanks for tuning in sooo [Music]

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Keywords: Sirvalorsax, Jazz Articulation, tounging for saxophone, Jazz music theory, how to play saxophone

Id: 9bu2o4gG8vc

Length: 12min 57sec (777 seconds)

Published: Sun May 03 2020