The Science and Art of Saxophone Teaching: The Essential Saxophone Resource

by Ray Smith

Dr. Ray Smith is the saxophonists' saxophonist, the teachers' teacher. His 50+ years of saxophone playing and teaching have prepared him well to bring together perhaps the greatest breadth of practical saxophone information ever assembled under one book cover in The Science and Art of Saxophone Teaching. This book is valuable to saxophone teachers and serious saxophone students alike covering such topics as basic tone production (embouchure, oral cavity, breath support) and solving problems with tone, playing low notes, slurring down over intervals, solving reed issues, saxophone repair and adjustments, coordinating classical and jazz study and practice, warmup exercises and practice routines, articulation basics and articulation styles, development of technique and speed, choosing fingerings, solving vibrato issues, working on intonation problems, playing dynamics, rhythmic development, learning altissimo (may be worth the price of the book alone), phrasing musically, choosing good breathing places, working with ornamentation and cadenzas, dealing with differences between styles, becoming a multilingual musician, doubling other woodwind instruments and helpful information on clarinet, flute and double reeds, dealing with stage fright, and much more. This volume belongs in the library of every earnest saxophonist. There are also a series of video tutorials on a coordinated YouTube channel that bring all the concepts to life. Ray has been blessed to be a master pedagogue and is sharing in this book the concepts, insights, and approaches he has used to help countless young players become great saxophonists and musicians. His track record as a professor at Brigham Young University is enviable. His students teach at many of the nations’ universities, perform in the Broadway pits, play in the service bands of the Army, Navy, and Marines, and write for Hollywood movies. One is playing with the Dukes of Dixieland, and one is currently holding down the first tenor chair in the famed University of North Texas 1 O’Clock Lab Band. Ray, himself, a disciple of Eugene Rousseau, is a fine performer and well-recorded artist. He is equally at home in classical and jazz-related styles and adept at all five woodwind instruments. He has been heard frequently on the airwaves of this country (ESPN, ABC, NBC, CNN, etc.), on movies such as The Sandlot and The Swan Princess, and on Television series such as Masters of the Universe, Xena, and Hercules.

352 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 24, 2021

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Ray Smith (the novelist) was born in Cape Breton in 1941.

For more than three decades, Ray Smith has occupied a distinctive position on the margins of the Canadian literary scene. His work is characterized by an interest in experimentation, but there is no discernible pattern of development. Each of his books is markedly different from the others, and none fits comfortably into the standard academic overviews of Canadian literature.

His first book, Cape Breton Is the Thought Control Centre of Canada (short fiction), is one of the earliest Canadian examples of experimental writing in the international tradition. (Of American writers, perhaps Donald Barthelme provides the closest analogue.) The relentless, witty interrogation of short story form underscores a parallel skepticism about received truths in other areas of life.

Smith's first novel, Lord Nelson Tavern, focuses on a group of about ten characters, most of whom have known each other from their student days. The first of its seven sections depicts that period of their lives as being relatively ordinary, but as their life stories unfold, their individual narratives become increasingly bizarre and exotic. One, for example, becomes a famous poet who marries an Oscar-winning actress. Another—the least likely—becomes a major player in a world-class drug smuggling operation; eventually he is murdered in accordance with Hollywood convention. A third becomes an internationally acclaimed artist, a fourth a producer of pornographic films, and so on.

Smith does not attempt to make such lives seem believable. Instead his interest is in exploring the voices of his characters, both spoken and written. Much of the book is in dialogue, and there are many unusually long speeches; two of the sections are transcriptions of diaries. Though many of the episodes involve comic exaggeration, the novel does address serious thematic issues, especially the nature of love and art, and the factors that promote and destroy them. Taken as a whole (and despite the sometimes frivolous and cynical rhetoric), Lord Nelson Tavern professes an almost Romantic faith in the validity of romantic love and the power of art to redeem human experience.

Read more: Ray Smith Biography http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4747...