As I reflect on my 3rd year nearly past, I view it as one of the most important

years in my time at RCS so far. By far it has also been one of my biggest years of
growth, not only as a musician, but also as a person as well. It has presented
many challenges that I have overcome and continue to work through, and shown
and continues to do so; the issues that I need to work on in order to reach the
highest level that I aspire to.
For the first Semester of my year, I spent my time in the Musik und Kunst
Privatuniversität der Stadt Wien, one of Vienna’s main conservatoires and, one of
the best conservatoires in Austria. This exchange continues to show itself as
something incredibly vital to my growth as a musician, and was absolutely
crucial for myself as an artist finding identity and something to say in my music,
as through it I gained a completely different cultural perspective that added to
my ideas of openness to other ways of living and thinking.
While studying there I had the absolute privilege to study with many
great teachers, mainly the renowned US tenor saxophonist Andy Middleton. He
opened me up to many different ideas and approaches to playing and practicing
and we worked through many of my weaknesses. What I found that really
needed work on my playing when I was there, was mainly my development of
ideas thematically, and my swing time feel. Thematic development is something
that I do find tricky to do and work on, but definitely since observing that
weakness and practicing it with Andy, who is an author on the subject, I
discovered that it did drastically improve, and added more cohesiveness to my
soloing overall. My time feel is something that I still continue to work on mainly
from my period in Vienna, I found that I had a tendency to rush phrases and lose
the beat as I became so concerned with complex harmony and trying to conquer
that in itself. It is interesting that I have found that many of these issues for me
personally greatly improve once I begin to thing about them and focus on those
concepts while playing. In the case of working on my time feel, I also have been
transcribing and emulating many of the great players whose time feel I love, like
Charlie Parker and Lee Konitz.
What I also really loved about my opportunity to study abroad was that it
enabled to be on a fresh page in many senses, and allowed me to work with Andy
on completely different ideas and concepts then I had before with Tommy Smith
or Paul Towndrow. One example would be even in the way I view approaches to
playing over chord changes. I would say my playing now features a lot more
upper structure triads and creative uses of larger intervals, more arpeggios and a
wide range of the horn regularly. Now when I reflect back on my playing and
approach to improvising a year ago through old recordings, the difference is like
night and day. I feel this shift in my approach to playing as something seismic,
and I really feel having that openness through my exchange enabled that
exploration.
I also used the opportunity of this time in Vienna to begin checking out
some more modern players such as Ben Van Gelder, Logan Richardson and Mark
Turner. This for me, was of vital importance as hearing these modern, very
individual players served as great inspiration to the way I play and apart from
my own conceptualisations of harmony and the way if affected my improvising, I
hold listening to these players and many others as another key element to my
growth this year.
 Another concept that I really worked on this year was the idea of
transcribing other instruments. At points I felt that my language was to
saxophone like, and I wanted more of a unique sound and unusual language that
not that many sax players play with. This involved me transcribing and listening
to players of different instruments. Mainly I transcribed Jim Hall, Pat Metheny
and Freddie Hubbard. I found this to be an incredibly useful and practical way of
breaking out of the stereotypical saxophone language and using more unique
concepts, like Jim Halls wide intervals and melodic development, or Freddie
Hubbard’s constantly swinging eight note lines. I found that this practice idea
really worked for me and has helped shape a lot of unique aspects in my playing.
Transcribing seems to work really efficiently for me, so it is something I will
continue to challenge myself with in coming months.
I feel like a shift in culture and living also had an effect on my
improvisation too, and it was a significant and difficult challenge to overcome
language barriers and some cultural differences, but ultimately I believe taking
on that challenge, and collaborating with complete strangers and bonding
through music has added a certain degree of confidence to my playing, which I
feel is very audible now when I listen to the intention behind my ideas last year
and now.
It was also incredibly inspiring to be on a scene and immersing yourself in
a different attitude and approach towards playing that I hadn’t felt quite on that
level before. Getting to hear and collaborate with players in that environment
was also a big part of realising my weaknesses, some of which I described above,
and served as a major inspiration as to how I could improve drastically them. I
also had the opportunity to see many of my heroes playing live, like Joe Lovano,
Jerry Bergonzi, Mark Turner and Ron Carter. These were some of the most
inspirational and beautiful moments in my life, and continue to be never ending
sources of inspiration to show how to play not just saxophone, but music.
The second half of my year in RCS is also something I consider to be of
extreme importance to me, and it proved a great framework in order for me to
further work on aspects of my playing.
Repertoire class was one of the big classes for me since I have come back
as it gives invaluable feedback every week, reflecting progress and areas that I
need to work on through the jazz standards language. Working on tunes like
Stablemates shows how I need to continue working on chromatic movement of
dominant chords, while a tune like Dolphin Dance reflects how I need to work on
part modal, part functional harmony. I feel like I have spent a great deal of time
on a lot of functional harmony in standards, but modal harmony is something I
need to work on in the future as it remains a difficulty. Through the rep class I
also realised major weaknesses I need to work on as I mentioned previously, like
my time feel, phrasing and solo pacing. I have made a lot of progress in these
areas as I mentioned above, but I will continue to work on them, mainly by
focusing on the records on the old masters, Charlie Parker, Sonny Stitt and
Freddie Hubbard, by transcribing and listening to capture these elements that
are so brilliantly on display in their playing.
My final repertoire that I have chosen this year was aimed to reflect all
the things I have been working on, and to give the opportunity to use them to
work on the weaker aspects of my playing. I chose Isfahan by Billy Strayhorn for
example, as it allows me to work on melodic development of ideas over changes,
and also solo rubato intros, something I have been very inspired and challenged
by through the playing of Maarten Hogenhuis. Stablemates by Benny Golson is
one of those classic difficult repertoire pieces for a jazz musician; it contains
chromatic ii-Vs, chromatic moving dominant chords and an odd form of fourteen,
eight, fourteen bar sections. Playing language, having great time and sound and
melodically developing ideas is incredibly difficult over this tune and it has been
one of my biggest tunes that I have worked on to achieve this to some degree, but
it always produces fresh ideas no matter how many times I play it. My own
composition, One, is challenging as it is written with odd and changing time
signatures, has an odd form, the harmony is non functional and modal and
therefore requires you to play over it in a completely different way from the
standards I mentioned above, but it enables me to show off the modern chord
scale harmony that I have been working hard at these past few months, and
improvising in odd times is something I still find somewhat difficult but through
working on this tune I have become much more comfortable and free in that
context.
3rd year has proven to be one of the most challenging but equally
rewarding years and I feel that I have worked very hard to achieve my goals this
year, and it is equally reflected in the progress of my playing. I have many things
that I will continue to work on, mainly time feel, bebop language, phrasing and
sound, but overall I am really pleased with the progress I have made through the
RCS and abroad. I am incredibly excited for my 4th and final year at the RCS, and
all of the challenges that it will no doubt bring. After my time here, I continue to
be inspired and motivated equally as I was in my first few days here, and I will
continue to work to the highest level of musicianship that I can.