Getz Variations — Dexter Morrill

Posted by Andrew D Meyer on April 5, 2020 in Live Shows, Saxophone, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Recently I’ve been working on a very interesting piece for tenor saxophone and fixed media by Dexter Morrill called “Getz Variations.” The piece was written for Stan Getz in 1984 and features samples of Stan himself playing in the audio track. The score has very little notated lines for the saxophonist to play, and instead functions more as a ‘map’ of what’s going on in the audio track. The saxophone improvises freely around the prerecorded audio, or over chord changes. As Morrill says in the score, “It’s not a set of variations in the historical sense,” but instead ‘variations’ refers to the many possibilities in performance of an improviser. Here are two videos of the first movement, titled “Echoes,” and the final movement, titled “Windows.”