Category: General

The US Air Force band, the Airmen of Note have announced auditions for the baritone chair. This is open to Americans 39 or younger. Its a great band and a chance to have one of the few guaranteed steady gigs left! Audition materials are due January 18th, with the audition date set in February. 

Click here to see the full flyer.

Intrepid baritonist, Andrew Gutauskas has released his second album titled, “Look Out!“. This comes after his first album “Look Up!” from 2017. Perhaps in the future we’ll see “Look Within!” to finish out the trilogy? [ Feel free to use that Andrew 😉 ]

Gutauskas is a wonderful player and composer and the music on this album is very uplifting and positive, much like the leader himself. The line-up is a baritone, bass, and drums with trombone added on some tracks. A classic no-chord sound harking back to the Gerry Mulligan / Bob Brookmeyer quartets, though the songs and playing here will sound a bit more modern.

Check out the video below for a taste of the album. And of course I’d encourage you to head over to Andrew’s BandCamp page to buy a copy!

Thank you to Jon De Lucia! We now have another Gerry Mulligan solo transcription in the repository. The song is titled “Stand Still” and the solo comes from the 1957 album co-led by Mulligan and Paul Desmond called Blues In Time. Its a nice short and playable solo, from a very nice album.

Head on over to the Transcriptions page to grab a copy.

As an added bonus you can hear Jon play the transcription and watch it in real time:

Anything related to Harry Carney is always welcome, so we’re very glad to announce that two new Carney transcriptions have been added to our repository. Thank you very much to Ben Huff!

The first is Agra, a classic Carney feature from Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite. And the second is from a somewhat lesser known, but still delightful album where the Ellington band played their own arrangements of music from Disney’s film, ‘Mary Poppins’. The Carney feature is on “Stay Awake”.

Head over to the transcriptions page and download them for yourself.

As of today, September 22nd, 2020 JazzBariSax.com will no longer serve Google Advertisements. The only revenue stream will be via affiliate links from products purchased through links users opt to click on at this site. All remaining hosting, domain, and bandwidth fees will be paid for by myself.

Nobody likes ads, and we certainly don’t need to have more of them from Google.

Enjoy the site, ad-free.

Andrew Hadro
Curator, JazzBariSax.com

There aren’t too many opportunities to hear music that is being performed live these days. Fortunately for baritonists everywhere Frank Basile will be performing at Small Club in NYC this Friday September 18th and it will be live streamed. We recently wrote about the album that Frank co-led with Sam Dillon and this will serve as the album release celebration. We highly recommend the album, and of course definitely recommend checking out the stream!

Its 4:45pm-6:30pm Eastern Standard, and you’ll need to sign up for an account but its otherwise free at http://smallslive.com

C.G. Conn made saxophones for many decades. Some of their best horns were produced in the late ’20’s and 30’s, decades before Selmer made a decent horn. And the characteristics of the Conn seem to really fit well with many baritonists. Players like Gerry Mulligan, Harry Carney, Ronnie Ross and many others used Conn’s as well as many modern day players. Perhaps its the style of projection, and large sound that Conn’s can produce. Regardless a lot of you out there love Conn’s as do I.

Well for us fans of the Conn, there is a new website and Instagram profile to enjoy. Its called “Connsortia” and has some great content. It has many photos of different engravings used on Conn saxophones, some of them stock, some of them incredible custom engravings of beautiful nature scenes or portraits. There are dozens of comparison photos of the famous “naked lady” or “lady face” engraving – I had no idea there was so much variety! There is a also a great deal of information about the master engravers. The site has other oddities like Billy True’s patented contraption to play 3 saxophones at once.

There are other sites out there too if you’d like to go down this rabbit hole (I do!), to learn about the history and see photos such as:
http://momie.org/cgconnartistengravedportraitinstruments.html
https://bassic-sax.info/pix/index.php?/category/369
http://saxpics.com/?v=man&manID=3

The Connsortia site is a sub-site of Getasax.com which is a reputable site that deals largely in vintage horns. Enjoy!