Once you acquire a solid foundation and experience with the core elements of technical quality, your next step as a musician is to colour that technical proficiency with expression. Interpretation is more than playing the right notes in the right order; your understanding of the piece and your feelings must be discernible in the way you approach it. Additionally, as a live performer, you communicate with your audience by using expressive elements while you play.

One good day, I went to a concert by American jazz saxophonist Courtney Fadlin, and I was blown away by his ability to do all that. I was so enthralled that, after the show, I asked him about lessons. Mind you, this happened before video calls became reliable and easily accessible. As Courtney was going back to the USA, he couldn’t grant my wish, but he could introduce me to a friend of his, a brilliant saxophonist based in England who would become the next mentor of my career: Mark Bunney.

Mark has a background in gospel, which I found very enriching. He has a fantastic way to build intensity into a song and take it to a higher level. In music, we call this ‘tension and release’. By introducing elements of uncertainty or unrest in the song, we create a sense of expectation, a suspense that eventually gets rewarded when the element gets solved or reaches a conclusion. While the foundations of tension and release are already laid in the composition, it’s with interpretation that it can actualize to its maximum potential.

As an example, here’s Mark performing ‘It Is Well With My Soul’ at Fallbrook Church in Houston, Texas:

Another thing Mark helped me incorporate into my music was clarity in my notes, especially the high ones. He’s very informative and breaks down concepts to make them easy to apply and understand. If you’d like to experience this for yourself, he now has a digital course about how to play the sax, which he has been developing for many years. You can find more information at SaxMastery.

Using the knowledge I received from all my mentors and the decades of experience I have in the music industry, I’ve also been working as a teacher for quite a while now. If you feel confident with the basics and want to hone your skills or improve your interpretation ability, inquire about lessons here.