I remember the first time I ever heard about Carolyn Breuer (pronounced Broy – er). I was sharing a quiet taxi ride in Munich, Germany with her father, trombonist / pianist Hermann Breuer. As I recall, I was about to doze off in the back seat, when Hermann remarked suddenly, “Saxophone players tend to practice a lot of patterns, don’t they?” I must have answered something like “Yeah, I guess so. Why?” “Well my daughter, who’s 12, started playing alto and she practices a lot of patterns.”, he replied. I mentioned to him that I had a few students at … Read More
Monthly Archives: February 2014
On the heels of my last posted exercise, which was inspired by Walter Bishop’s “A Study in 4ths”, and which ended with an ascending figure of a diminished scale in Perfect 4ths, I thought it could be cool to further investigate some of the possibilities of P4th relationships within a diminished scale. I had considerably diminished the use of the diminished scale in my own playing for quite a while now, since I’ve felt that the modes of Melodic Minor (which is 2 notes shy of being a diminished scale), primarily the “altered scale” (seventh mode, diminished / whole tone) … Read More