[More in the continuing saga of Suzy and my first experience as part of a theater pit band. We will be doing the Second Story Rep’s production of Cole Porter’s ‘Anything Goes’.]
Tonight Jamie and Liz have set up the second reed sectional at our house. I think Suzy and I benefit from this more than Jamie (reed book one) and Liz (reed book two). When Suzy and I practice we practice against the ‘Anything Goes’ CD to get the speed and timing down. We are also listening to the CD in our cars and offices. When we do a sectional it is sans CD to get the rythmn and double check our edits and transposed parts as necessary. We started with over a hundred pages of music before the cuts and then additions.
The music really moves fast. Almost every thing is cut time. But there is a nice soprano sax solo in ‘Easy to Love’ that I am loving. Suzy has a number of exposed parts in the music so that anyone that comes to the performance will be able to pick her out.
Jamie is playing alto sax and Bb soprano clarinet. Liz is playing flute. Suzy is playing tenor sax and Bb soprano clarinet. I’m playing soprano, tenor, and bari sax. The music is very jazzy too. Next week we will get to play with the singers and dancers. The timing kind of goes like this. Auditions 5 weeks out. Practice starts four weeks out. All edits and rewrites done three weeks out. Two weeks of intense practice including five hour sessions on Saturdays. The last week is ten or more hours of practice spread over a number of days.
One final challenge. I can change from tenor to bari sax in five (cut-time) bars. Some of the lead-ins have shorter measures than that. I hope to get it down to four (1,2-2,2-3,2-4,2) measures.
The Bis Key Chronicles 
I have not been able to switch instruments any faster as my sax instructor quessed. It easily takes ten to twelve beats to swap the instruments out. But the low tenor sax notes are speaking much easier. Some of the songs has the whole orchestra playing at a whisper so the unmic’d singers can be heard.