Terence Martin

Actuary by day, sax player and arranger by night.

 

I started arranging music for saxes as a sneaky way to get my son to practice. He was more willing to play duets with me than to practice by himself. We both got bored with the few duets in his book, so I started arranging my own. That soon morphed into arranging quartets.

 

In every one of my arrangements, I try to let each voice take center stage, even if it's just for a few measures. Some of this is motivated by selfishness: I'm primarily a tenor player, and the tenor can be too low for the melody, but too high to get the cool bass lines. I've played quartets where the tenor part is pretty boring. Rob McWade, the previous tenor player in the Royal City Saxophone Quartet, compared the tenor part to oatmeal: it fills in the middle, but isn't very exciting. I try to make sure nobody gets oatmeal all the time.