Veteran Sax Heavyweight Steve Slagle on Originality, Composition, Theory, and Much More

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Introduction

I remember first hearing about Steve Slagle when I was at Jamey Aebersold summer jazz workshop and saw guitarist Dave Stryker playing at the camp. When I was checking out Dave’s C.D.’s and found a few YouTube clips, I noticed Dave was playing with this alto player I hadn’t heard of before but really dug his sound and approach. Once I found out this alto player was Steve Slagle, I added him to my list of players to keep listening to and learn more about. Years later, Steve reached out wanting to contribute to the site and share his wisdom that comes from not only his storied playing career, but also teaching countless students at The Manhattan School of Music for 20-plus years. For those of you who want to learn more about Steve, check out the bio below before we dive into the conversation.

Biography

  • Steve Slagle, is a saxophonist, flutist, composer and educator making his home in New York City.
  • Steve attended Berklee College of Music in Boston on a Downbeat scholarship at age 18 and subsequently received his Masters in Music at MSM in NYC.
  • Steve has played with Stevie Wonder, Machito’s Afro-Cuban Orchestra, Steve Kuhn, Lionel Hampton, Jack McDuff, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, Brazil’s Milton Nascimento and band, Carla Bley Orchestra, Ray Barretto, Beastie Boys, and many others.
  • He has released 20 CD’s as a leader, and performed on countless others. His many original compositions are published by Slagle Music, BMI worldwide. Steve was musical director of the Mingus Big Band for many years, and wrote many of the bands arrangements as well with Joe Lovano’s Nonet, of which he is a member. He has received two Grammy Awards for recordings with each of those groups and continues his association with them. As a leader, Steve concentrates on new sounds and new compositions as a performer, bandleader and recording artist.
  • Scenes, Songs and Solo’s (Schaffner Press) is Steve’s first book on composition and improvisation. This book points his direction for young players as well as containing many of his compositions and ideas on music.
  • Steve served on the faculty of Manhattan School of Music for 20 years as well as associations with Rutgers University, NYU, New School in NYC, William Paterson, NJ, and SUNY Purchase as well as master classes and clinics worldwide.
  • Steve’s first recording as a leader was on Japan’s Polydor Label and he continues that relationship as endorser of Yanagisawa saxophones as well as a long time endorser of Vandoren (Dansr) Reeds.

Interview

ZS: Have you found that there is a specific process for developing your own sound that you can consciously implement, or teach students to implement themselves?

SS: That is a pretty heavy question, but if you look at the saxophone like a voice, we are all born with a voice. In one sense, everyone is born with a sound but that makes it sound too easy because the fact is you have to work in order to bring your sound out. There is no book that can be written or a teacher that can teach you how to find your own sound because that is very personal.

The interesting thing is your sound is your sound and it really won’t change once you develop it. When it comes to how you develop it, music is all about listening and hearing in your head. In the case of a sound, it’s a combination of your listening to a wide variety of saxophone players and in your head, you have a sound that is your voice. It’s like if you are a singer and you grow up listening to a bunch of singers that you like, there is no way you are ever going to sound like any of them, you are only going to sound like yourself. The whole point is to find out what your sound is.

That is something for me personally that took awhile. I started playing when I was ten but it really wasn’t until in my twenties when I was at Berklee in Boston that I heard something in my head. I was working to bring it out and it wasn’t something that happened in one day, but it slowly developed.

You have to work on it with the idea that you have an individual sound. The thing with saxophone compared to voice or other instruments is players can get very hung up on equipment and try different mouthpieces, saxophones, and reeds, believing it will create their sound and that’s not true.

Now, equipment does make a difference and it’s good to explore, but if you get obsessed with that then you are putting the cart before the horse. First, you have a sound and that sound is really going to be almost the same on any instrument or mouthpiece that you play. To develop your sound is hearing your inner voice, bringing it out, realizing that it’s there, and working on it.

There are certain technical things you can do to work on sound, but it really is a personal thing. I don’t think any great player would say so-and-so taught me my sound. It comes from yourself and that’s why the best analogy is a singer because you are born with that voice. There is a certain thing about practicing alone that is important, but your sound really comes forth when you are playing with people, so your sound is a part of a group.

There is an interesting thing that Duke Ellington said about composition but it’s true of so many things – “there are a thousand ways to do something, but there is only one way for you to do it.” He was talking about arranging and composition, but that is true with sound.

For the saxophone, there is such a variety of sound, and I think the human voice is the only instrument that has more variety of sounds than the saxophone. You can go from Paul Desmond on alto to Archie Shepp on tenor and think that these are totally different instruments which don’t sound remotely similar, but they both have their own sound.

As a young player, you have certain sounds that you are attracted to the most and that influence you in a way which comes down to listening really hard and hearing the nuances. The one thing that some players are guilty of is just listening to one player when they are young. Let’s say players who come up just listening to John Coltrane – which is a lot to listen to – those players are most likely going to develop a sound that is close to his and that can get boring when everyone starts sounding the same, so finding your own unique sound is imperative. I remember Miles Davis used to use the word “copy” – “Oh, he is just a copy” and to him that was the worst thing to say. There is some truth to that because there are musicians today that are copycats and it’s easy to fall into that.

One thing where I was blessed as a young kid was my parents and uncle were both into jazz, so I was exposed to hundreds of different players’ sounds before I was fifteen years old. In most cases, you are most influenced by the players that came before you. Now, I listen to everyone who’s playing good in this music, but I am not really influenced by players that came after me. I think players should be influenced by those that came before them.

ZS: How have you developed and maintained your musical community? Why is it so important?

SS: For me, when I first got through high school, there were only two or three schools that taught jazz. Now, there are probably a thousand schools that teach jazz and for me there weren’t, so the idea of community is the reason I am in New York City.

For example, when Covid hit, the one thing that still existed was the community of musicians in New York. No clubs were open and almost no recording studios were open, but I did record an album called Nascentia in 2021 at the only studio that was open in New York.

My point is, the one thing that still existed was the community where you could still call someone on the phone, hang out and make a session, or go to the park and play. I remember going out with a bass player and drummer and playing at Riverside Park and it was fun. New York really has a strong community and other places that have strong music schools as well, but no place has the tradition of improvised music like New York City. The great thing about New York is if you call a bass player and he or she is not available, there are at least fifteen other players in your book you can reach out to and that’s way more than any other place that I have been. The community is almost overloaded now with the schools and I taught at Manhattan School of Music as a full-time professor for twenty-one years, so I see every year they graduate more players trying to find a gig and it’s almost overloaded. My musical community was stronger and tighter knit when I arrived in NYC compared to now where it’s wider and bigger, but I think eventually it will even itself out.

ZS: On the topic of piano playing, what would you say is the bare minimum skills a sax player needs in order to effectively use the piano as a tool?

SS: I know many of the great players and there are some great players who don’t play piano at all. For me, it was very important to learn piano because I started out falling in love with the saxophone. All I did was play the saxophone at first but then I got to a certain point when I started writing and arranging my own music where I realized I needed to know a chordal instrument such as piano or guitar. I realized I didn’t need to be at a level where I could perform on it – nothing wrong with that. But everything on my horn is abstract because it’s our fingers and head and it’s not really in front of us.

But, on the piano it’s like looking at the entire orchestra so when you learn voicings and harmonies you get a whole lot more that you can work with. That’s not to say that a player can’t do that without a piano, like Bach for example just doing so by ear. There is no reason that you have to play piano, but the piano is a great instrument to bring you to that.

When I compose and arrange, I don’t make it all just sitting at the piano because if I do it becomes piano centric. The good thing is to have the knowledge of the piano but then throw it away when you are in the process of creating. When creating, you do a combination of what you hear, what you can play, and what harmonies you have on piano.

I find sometimes an accident can lead you to something new. I could be playing a C7 chord with a nine on top and instead my finger hits something else and I think “what’s that?”.

If you go out of the box of just traditional ways of learning and practicing, then in a sense it’s personal to each player. But for me it was very important because it brought me into a deeper sense of harmony and developed me into being an arranger. I believe as an arranger you need some skills with the sense of an orchestra and not just saxophone because you are not just arranging for saxophone. If you were going to play “Moment’s Notice”, you can play the melody on the saxophone. But if you could play all the chords on piano – minor 7th chords moving in half-steps, you realize just playing the melody is not going to show you the chord under every note. That is an example where you are going to have to dissect that song where you can play the arpeggios on the horn but on piano it’s instant and you are playing the chords right there. I wouldn’t mind if you could play chords on the saxophone.

I fell in love with the piano when I was a little bit older, around nineteen when I had already developed a certain level of skill on the saxophone. I stood to the left-hand side of the piano players I was jamming with and while I played, I would just look at their hands for hours and then I would go to the practice room and try and play some of that. If we were playing the blues, I would do my thing, but I would be looking at the piano player’s hands to try and learn.

ZS: When it comes to composition, what is your process for composing your own music? How do you educate your students on the importance of composition and how to start composing their own music?

SS: Composition is a whole other thing compared to being a player. There is no process to compose. There are composition teachers at most schools and in one sense it’s the most ambiguous thing to be teaching because you can’t really teach it. What you can do is show examples and show players how you went through composing a certain song of yours that only you would know how you approached this tune. It’s really not something I can just call on and it’s more like you get an inspiration of a thought which could be a melody or a sequence of notes and then the harmony to it and at a certain point it grows on its own. Sometimes, it grows real quickly and other times it takes weeks.

One tune that came to me in ten minutes was a chart I was working on called “Believer”. This tune is pretty complicated, and I arranged for Joe Lovano’s Nonet and it came to me in one ten-minute period on piano. The reason I call it “Believer” is it made me believe that you can tap into something so quickly that you weren’t even aware you were thinking of. One chord and melody that led to the other to the end of the song. I could never force myself to create a song like this from scratch. Many times you will throw away compositions that are no good and sometimes you get some help from a teacher that gives you advice about your tune and ways you could approach it.

I didn’t come up as someone who transcribed other players’ solos that much. I would hear something like Joe Henderson’s “Serenity” and I would want to transcribe that song. Once I learned that song, I didn’t have to learn Joe Henderson’s solo after I knew the melody, chords, and structure. I’ll write a song and it will be just as hard for me to play on as when I learned “Serenity”. Because you wrote a song doesn’t mean you can play it. You have to practice playing your song or someone else’s and that is a relationship you first start by digging some of the great composers. By studying these composers, you will start transcribing their songs then getting into your own style of writing. Doing it a lot and incorporating it into your musical life is important. Playing freely everyday when you practice is key because some days it will lead to nowhere and other days you will suddenly find a musical idea that you can expand upon even if it’s only a few notes.

The main advice I have had is from other players in my bands. I will bring in a song or arrangement. One example would be the Mingus Big Band. I arranged over twelve pieces for that band that they are still playing today, but one that is most popular is “Fables of Faubus” which I did early in the band’s existence. I spent a lot of time on that arrangement and when we ran it down the first time it was right before a gig. Randy Brecker was playing the solo trumpet part.

In this tune, it came to a stop in my arrangement that went to the next section of the tune. At the pause, I would count into the next section. Now at the pause, Randy just kept playing alone and at first I thought “that’s wrong”, but he started playing some beautiful stuff so to this day on this arrangement at that part, the trumpet player plays alone which came out of nowhere.

Great things can come out of accidents. One great example is Monk would play two notes such as a C major 7 voicing then put a Bb next to the B so C-E-G-Bb-B. Now some would call that an accident or a disharmony but if you hear it enough it starts to sound really right.

ZS: Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to add? 

SS: In the world right now, look at what human beings have done, and I don’t mean in music but everything in the world. I was reading this article about how these guys are in Antarctica in an atomic submarine a mile below an ice cap traveling around. Their goal is spying on other countries and with nuclear warheads that could destroy an entire country in a second. These guys are in forty below zero temperature and I was thinking, “Woah, this is what human beings really want to do?”.

I was thinking we have a choice of either having hell on earth or heaven on earth and I don’t mean this religiously, but with music you are able to bring heaven on earth. All these other events, you can be baffled to think “how can a human being be put on this planet to be in a submarine forty degrees below zero with atomic weapons, what is heavenly about that?”

Let’s say when you listen to Coltrane play “Naima”, you hear a sound that is reaching to the heavens and that for a musician or non-musician is what life is about. It’s the best thing in life. I think people need to start realizing the power of music and not just pop music. Now, I like all kinds of music but you sometimes need to dig a little deeper in your life to find the best things that are a little bit uncomfortable.

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