The Hidden Language of Modern Saxophone Players feat. Ryan Devlin

The saxophone is one of the most versatile instruments in music. It can be found in orchestras, wind ensembles, marching bands, rock bands, pop bands—even Taylor Swift's band had a saxophone player! 

What makes the saxophone truly remarkable is that no two players sound alike. Throughout history, artists such as Lester Young, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Michael Brecker, Lenny Pickett, and Kenny G have each redefined the instrument, shaping what we recognize today as modern saxophone playing. 

In Ryan’s own career, he’s had the privilege to study with legends that have shaped the saxophone themselves, like Jerry Bergonzi and Chad Lefkowitz-Brown. From those experiences, he’s organized a set of modern saxophone techniques designed to help players unlock new parts of their horn. These methods go beyond traditional exercises, they focus on building the flexibility, creativity, and sound required to thrive as a modern musician. If you'd like to study these concepts in depth, check out Ryan’s full course, Modern Saxophone Techniques. Also be sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video The Hidden Language of Modern Saxophone Players feat. Ryan Devlin.

Let’s get playing!

Contents

False fingerings

Superimposing key centers

Chromatic cells

False fingerings

The first concept we're going to dive into is from the Michael Brecker section of the course, and this covers false fingerings. False fingerings can be defined in a couple different ways. They're basically a different timbred version of the same note on the saxophone. There's a bunch of them on the horn, and Michael Brecker implements them in a lot of different ways. So we’re just going to talk about what they are and how to use them.

The easiest ones to do are with our palm keys, because we can just vent some other notes to get the overtone or the false fingering of the palm key notes. So the easiest one right off the bat is D. If you play D and then you keep the octave key down and over-blow your G fingering, you get another version of that D that kind of sounds a little bit out of tune, but really it's more of an effect. 

You can do this going up chromatically with your palm keys and with the fingerings of the overtones, meaning, if D natural is G, Eb is Ab, E is A, and F is Bb. You can also use the front fingerings for the palm key. So like E natural, you can play E natural with your front 1-2-3, and the front key, and then vent your right hand to get that same kind of sound. Same thing with the front F. 

It's just a different kind of effect of getting the same note. You can go downwards as well. So if we start on D, we have the overtone G, then C# is F#, C is F, Bb is Eb, and A is D. So you can kind of go up or down chromatically. And to get G sharp, Ryan plays the C sharp fingering and over-blows that.

Michael Brecker has a ton of these overtone lines. We include a couple of them in this resource. One of them is going up from A—we go A, B, C, C#, D. You play the note, then the overtone, then the note, and then the overtone. Try practicing it nice and slow. When you listen to Michael Becker play it, he plays this at incredible speeds, and it almost sounds like he's playing a different instrument at a certain point, because the overtones have such an interesting timbre. And it really swings, too—it's almost like that kind of triplety doodle-tongue kind of thing when put in the right context at the right tempos. 

After he plays those up, he usually will play down from D natural and go D, C#, C a couple times.

Another one that he does is from B natural—this one's made famous by Freddy Hubbard on trumpet. A lot of instrumentalists play this, but the way that we’re doing it is by playing the B regular fingering, and then just venting the right hand, which puts down the Bis key to Bb, so it kind of flattens everything a half step.

And then we go up to D and back down to A and do the same false fingering. Another cool thing about chromatic cells is that you can stack these overtone lines together. 

Another really cool one that Steve Grossman does a lot, but Brecker definitely implemented is playing up the horn, but over-blowing the notes to make a different set of notes come out. So if we play F, G, Bb, C, but we over-blow it. Basically we’re trying to play a partial up. So we’re pinching our reed a little bit off, to not have all the air come through it, and we’re over-blowing the note. So instead of it coming out regular, we overblow when we go back down to the F and play the overtones above it in that same sequence. You can do this with a lot of different notes. You can do it on D as well and go D, G, Bb, C, D, up to Eb. 

Any of these overtones can be played in these lines as well. 

Superimposing key centers

Now let's get into concept number two. This is something that Jerry Bergonzi showed Ryan when he was studying at New England Conservatory. For this, we are superimposing different key centers on top of a tune. 

For instance, playing up a half step over a blues really helps our flexibility in the harmony and being able to hear things far away, so that it's easier to play things inside. In the course, we talk about playing the same song in two different keys. For example, if we’re playing an F blues let’s think about superimposing other keys of blues on top of that. Something Bergonzi would do is play in his left hand, like the tune Solar (or a blues) in one key, let's say the original key of Cm for solar, and then he would play F# minor Solar in his right hand, and solo in Abm, and play all these different keys. And he would really emphasize that the melody you play is more important than the notes that are actually being played. 

Let’s look at an example over an G blues for a couple choruses, and then think about the tune in Abm. So the tune is in G, but we’re going to be thinking about it in Abm, and that means our home scale will be Abm pentatonic.

And we’re thinking about the blues being Abm, but the tune is actually us playing in my G.

Chromatic cells

For our final topic, we’ll look at chromatic cells. There are a few concepts Michael Brecker took from Coltrane and kind of developed in his own way, and one of those concepts is chromatic cells. There's a lot of content about chromatic cells, and they can be defined in a lot of different ways, but we’ll be thinking about this by taking the context away from chord changes—chromatic cells are their own device. 

Michael Brecker plays a lot of different kinds of chromatic cells, and we're going to talk about a couple of them today. The first one is about as chromatic as it can get. It's a four note cell—with the key center being the first and last notes of the cell. If we start in C, we're going to go C, B, Bb, C. So that's 1, 7, b7, 1. You can play this in different sequences, but the best way to practice it is chromatically. So let’s try ascending and descending.

Practicing this through the full range, we can do this in intervals of minor thirds, going up the diminished...

And in circle of fourths. 

But like we said at the beginning, taking these chromatic cells and using them as their own harmonic device is really cool. So thinking about playing this over maybe Rhythm changes or a blues—something you're comfortable with.

Another cell that you can practice is a minor third cell. This one has a minor third at the beginning of it, and then is chromatic after that.

So if we start in C again, it's going to be C, Eb, D, C, you can practice the same way—chromatically, fourths, minor thirds, and so on. 

And we can think about playing several chromatic cells together, kind of mixing and matching a couple of them into compound cells. 

That’s all we have for today, but if you’re interested in learning more, make sure to check out Ryan’s course with Jazz Lesson Videos, Modern Sax Techniques. And if you want to see how Ryan covers the content we covered today, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video The Hidden Language of Modern Saxophone Players feat. Ryan Devlin.

See you next time!