“Windsor Mews” contains a technique you call “counter sliding harmonic chords.” Can you explain that concept?     This is something I have been working on for some time, and both “Windsor Mews” and “Uniformitarianism” feature this style. The idea is to

THERE ARE A FEW REASONS LYRICAL SOLOING SEEMS to come easier to horn players than bassists. First, by default, horn players spend a lot of their musical time playing melodies, thus burning melodicism deep into their musical DNA. Second, and perhaps more important, the saxophone is nowhere near as pattern-based as the bass. There’s something about the bass’s frets, dots, and strings that makes the fingerboard look like a big checkerboard to our pattern-craving cerebral cortex: Instead of allowing the deeper concerns of harmony and melody dictate our lines, the fingerboard’s visual and digital patterns easily seduce us, corrupting our note choices. One way around this is to seek opportunities to break out of our habitual, pattern-oriented playing by forcing our left hand to confront familiar sounds in unfamiliar ways. The most common major scale shape starts on the 2nd finger (Fig. 1). Try starting the scale on your 1st, 3rd, and 4th fingers, too. Since these shapes may be More...