I went down to Curtis' studio yesterday to record some saxophone solos for a blues rock song he's producing. I like playing on rock songs because it forces me to reign in my tonal choices during the solo. I've been so trained in the jazz idiom that my instinct is to start getting creative by playing around a lot with the scale, a ninth there, maybe a sixth here, even trying to play out of the key. But rock songs don't want any of that and it can be refreshing to try to be rhythmically and melodically interesting without resorting to that level of jazz pretentiousness. Don't get me wrong. I love jazz. But there's a reason that it fell out of favor as a music for the average joe and into the hands of academics and I blame complexity with a dash of pretension.
After the recording session we went out to dinner at a nearby Italian place and had some great calamari and cavatelli (mine was in tomato cream sauce that was superb) and a fine bottle of merlot. All in all, we had a great Saturday afternoon and evening. Hopefully, they'll stop up this way and we can go to Pequod's pizza at some point.
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