Jeff Antoniuk – Educator
In the last couple of months I have been enjoying some great educational posts by a few saxophonists/teachers for whom I have a great deal of respect. I have done a lot of teaching over the years and, for the most part, very much enjoy it. However, as I have alluded to in previous posts, it is a challenge for me to quantify my improvising “process” because I tend to be a pretty intuitive player. So when people who are great players are able to break things down in ways that facilitate a new perspective I really appreciate it. A while back Jeff Antoniuk posted a video called “Scales Suck”. Notwithstanding the provocative tone of the post’s title, I thought that Jeff’s assessment had a lot of merit. In my improvising I’ve always been a lot more oriented towards focusing on chord tones, and that seemed to be the thrust of Jeff’s thesis. He has tempered that position somewhat more recently, but the way that he has built the series of videos has been really thoughtful and makes good musical sense, to me at least.
Anyway, Jeff has a YouTube channel with a wealth of great educational material for all instrumentalists interested in improvising. You can find it here. I would encourage anyone interested in improvising to spend some time checking out these videos. (I think the “Scales Suck” is #2, but I have watched several of the others and they are all fantastic. Thanks Jeff!!
In upcoming posts I’ll be talking about some other colleagues who are doing equally interesting work, but in the meantime enjoy what Jeff Antoniuk has to offer.
All the best! Phil Dwyer