Direct Practice:

I have read and heard many things about improving sight reading. But to really improve at it, it must be approached like any other aspect of your playing you wish to master. You need to start slow. Trying to read something that you have no chance of playing correctly will only create frustration, and provide minimal to no gain. There are a couple of good approaches, one is to take some very easy music and try to sight read it quickly (with metronome of course!). This will get you some experience of keeping up at a fast tempo. But alternatively, you can also take difficult music and read it slowly. Just like anything else, you start with a tempo where you can play it, and speed it up gradually.

One of the most important things I can say, is when you are alone and practicing sight reading, practice as if you were performing with other musicians. This means that if you make a mistake, you can’t begin at your error, you must continue with the tempo because the rest of the musicians would continue playing and not wait for you. If you’re having trouble keeping the time you must slow the tempo down until you can. It’s only when you practice at a speed where everything feels solid that you are ready to slowly move up the tempo.

Head Games:

The other aspect of being a great reader is being mentally prepared. Any time you receive a new piece of music you have some amount of time before you play it. Quickly scan and identify the important/difficult things.
– Key signature (and key changes)
– Time signature (and time changes)
– Repeats, Jumps (Coda/DS/DC etc…)
– Difficult lines/rhythms
– Page turns (learn how to manage your pages effectively)
– Instrument/mute changes

Don’t waste your time on the notes you won’t have any trouble playing, but try to slowly finger through any fast runs as time allows, or even sing the difficult rhythms in your head slowly. You can give yourself a distinct advantage by using this crunch time when you first see a chart when others are goofing off! Like other skills you will become better and quicker at identifying the critical elements in a chart before playing the more you do it.

Jake Lampe

Chris sounded phenomenal as can be expected. His tone came across as broad, bright and full. Since he was amplified through a Sennheiser 421 it wasn’t possible to truly guage his actual tone, as the microphone offered more presence and less body than we would hear otherwise, but this in no way took away from the beauty of his playing, or flawless technique he demonstrated.

Chris performed arrangements he recently completed so I was not familiar with the music with the exception of a student arrangement of “Seven Eleven” which is from his 1997 recording Unspoken. The UT Jazz Orchestra played very cleanly and with impressive style, with significant talent to be found in each section of the band.

The two highlights of the night for me were the solo cadenza’s Chris offered up at the end of a couple of his tunes, where he floated through the keywork on his sax as if riding on a bed of air. Jumping through different harmonic centers probably faster than I can even think them, and painting walls of sound with flurries of notes.

Only if I stretch can I find a criticism to make. Every musical selection featured mixed meter, which is very impressive, interesting and stimulating but after the first two tunes the freshness of it wore off and I was left craving the rhythmic stability that wasn’t offered up during his whole performance. Even as someone who can understand and appreciate the rhythmic complexity, counting beats to dissect the breakdown of the unbalanced measures I was left slightly disappointed to only hear this single style.

I have seen Chris three times before. The first was at the Main Street Jazz Festival in Columbia, South Carolina. He sat in with the USC Left Bank Jazz Orchestra taking my lead tenor solo on one of the charts we performed. This was quite an experience, as he stood merely a couple of feet to my right playing into the microphone I previously had been using. The second time I saw Chris was just the last few minutes of a performance at a local Jazz club in Columbia which I had to race to after a Country Club gig I had just finished. Here I got to talk with him for a few minutes, and he was a genuinely great and sharing individual. The 3rd performance was at the Art Center in Carrboro Hill, NC a few minutes from where my parents live. This was with the Jae Sinnett quartet. This was the perfect venue for me, as he performed many standards as well as one of my favorite tunes of his “Wistful”. Like every other time I have heard him, he sounded phenomenal even despite being ill and suffering from Vertigo.

I truly believe that Chris will go down as one of the finest jazz musicians that has ever lived, and always look forward to where his ingenious mind will lead him next musically.

Jake Lampe

John Mills is one of central Texas’ most in-demand saxophonists, arrangers, and composers, covering a complete spectrum of musical styles — jazz, R&B, salsa, classical, rock ‘n roll, world music, country, funk, alternative, blues, folk, gospel, and more — in concert and in the recording studio. During his diverse professional career he has performed, arranged, and composed on a vast number of CD’s, film/TV soundtracks, and jingles.

He is an also an active educator, clinician and adjudicator. While Director of Jazz Studies at Southwest Texas State University, his students won three Downbeat Magazine awards and he designed a bachelor’s of Music degree in Jazz Studies which is now fully approved by the Texas governing board and enjoying success. Some of his former students have toured with the jazz orchestras of Ray Charles, Harry Connick Jr., and Maynard Ferguson.

John Mills’ new CD on 482 Records, Courage “The Way Out Is Via the Door,” teams him with legendary jazz bassist Steve Swallow and revered poet Robert Creeley. This unique project showcases his compositions as well as his improvisations on saxophones, flute, bass clarinet, and textural keyboards.

Monster Big Band
Bakers Dozen
John Mill’s Times Ten
James Polk Sextet
Butch Miles’ Jazz Express
Tony Campise Big Band with special guest vocalists