Klarinet Archive - Posting 000282.txt from 2003/08

From: <vze537hw@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Mouthpiece patches, stiff upper lip
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 11:07:53 -0400

I'm no Lester Young either, but I 'hit' on that way after twenty-eight years of struggling with a dental problem - one front tooth slightly longer than the other thanks to a baseball accident at age twelve. I just moved the mouthpiece to the left to try and correct the angle and relieve the pressure on the 'long tooth'...no
comments from the peanut gallery...and without tip-toeing into the
dark/light sound controversy, it made my tone more focused, with a good bit more other words I won't hash out here...it just gave me the kind of sound I fought and strove for years to achieve.

Not that I wasn't happy with my results during those years, just always looking for the sound I knew I could get and wasn't. (It makes sense eto my tired brain this morning, trust me) Now I have a problem like that others have described here of late, in that the tooth injured long ago is dying and needs to be replaced. Do I have the new crown/bridge made just like the old tooth, longer than the other, or nice and even and deal with changing again? Or will the change in dental setup necessitate the change? I'm very
comfortable with the mouthpiece a little 'off' now.

But it affords me the opportunity to take three months off and then work on my own biting problems a little more from scratch...I have always fought using too much lower lip over the teeth anyway, and want to approach the whole thing fresh. Any and all suggestions beyond what's been posted here already are warmly welcomed.

Don Hatfield

> You hit upon a method of playing the saxophone that's *preferred* by
> several jazz sax players. Kenny G always plays that way. (Yeah, I know,
I
> know - - but I'm not going to make the ritual vomiting noises here,
because
> before Kenny G had a family to feed, switched to holding one note for ten
> minutes at a time on a soprano sax and made buckets of money playing
> jazzlite and wussypop, he was a respected legit jazz tenor sax player
named
> Ken Garrett.) I wonder if Kenny G got the sidewinder idea from the
> brilliant Lester Young, who played tenor with Count Basie. There's a good
> photo of Lester Young playing with his mouthpiece extremely sidesaddle on
> p. 55 of Paul Lindemeyer's _Celebrating the Saxophone_ (New York: Harvest,
> 1996). I get nothing but squeaks if I try to play that way, but then I'm
> no Lester Young.

> You hit upon a method of playing the saxophone that's *preferred* by
> several jazz sax players. Kenny G always plays that way. (Yeah, I know, I
> know - - but I'm not going to make the ritual vomiting noises here, because
> before Kenny G had a family to feed, switched to holding one note for ten
> minutes at a time on a soprano sax and made buckets of money playing
> jazzlite and wussypop, he was a respected legit jazz tenor sax player named
> Ken Garrett.) I wonder if Kenny G got the sidewinder idea from the
> brilliant Lester Young, who played tenor with Count Basie. There's a good
> photo of Lester Young playing with his mouthpiece extremely sidesaddle on
> p. 55 of Paul Lindemeyer's _Celebrating the Saxophone_ (New York: Harvest,
> 1996). I get nothing but squeaks if I try to play that way, but then I'm
> no Lester Young.

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