I had a blast playing in church this morning! Most praise team music isn’t complex; it”s primarily diatonic stuff that gives me a chance to work extensively in a particular key center, hashing out pentatonic licks, bebop scales, and so forth. It felt particularly good to be playing nice lines in the altissimo register–like, “Hey! I can actually get around up here!”
But this evening in my practice session, I drilled down into more complex material. Last year I was working heavily on my diminished whole-tone scales. More recently, I”ve been hammering out my Jewish scale, which is one name I”ve heard applied to the fifth mode of the harmonic minor scale. I”ve been running the same digital patterns over both scales, working my way around the circle of fifths to develop facility in every key.
Both the DWT and Jewish scales have built-in tones that work perfectly with altered dominant chords. But each scale has its own very distinctive sound. So I”m now implementing a new approach in my practicing that will help me integrate the two scales fluidly, so I can rapidly shift from one to the other. Tonight, I took the tone center of Bb and worked on both scales in it. I chose Bb because I find it to be one of the more challenging tone centers for these scales, particularly for the Jewish scale.
Challenging is good. I like “challenging”–particularly when I can feel the results settling into both my fingers and my ability to hear more colorful melodies and note choices. Love those flat ninths and flat sixths! It takes work to get them onto my palette, but I really value having the ability to toss them onto the musical canvas when and how I choose.
Growth: there’s no end to it in music. There’s always something to learn, some new discipline to work on. The endless demands of mastering an instrument can be frustrating at times. But they’re also one of the things that, for me, make playing the sax so fulfilling.
