Exercises for Tenor Saxophone from Stanley Turrentine’s Improvisations

Abstract

This research presents tenor saxophone exercises based on the improvisations of Stanley Turrentine under CTI Records.  The researcher selected the three songs of Stanley Turrentinen including Sugar, Storm, and Gibraltar for the analysis of their notable characteristics. The purpose of this analysis was to clarify the basic notable characteristics of jazz for the creation of tenor saxophone exercises.  The results found that Stanley’s songs comprised pentatonic scales, blues scales, triplets, rhythmic motive, motive development, rhythmic displacement, john coltrane lick, and saxophone techniques.  The results were applied to the creation of ten tenor saxophone exercises. The exercises ranging from easy to difficult were designed for learners with knowledge of saxophone and jazz theories or level 4-6 learners as graded by Benedict (1992) in his study entitled “Incorporating Jazz into the Study of Saxophone at the Undergraduate Level: a Graded Index of Materials and Recommendations for their Use”. Besides, the exercises included practices of ii V I chords in major scale frequently found in jazz improvisation.