Saxman Jonathan Ragonese on 250 Transcriptions, Inspired Fundamentals, and More

By / Featured, Interviews / , , , , ,

Introduction

It’s always exciting when you stumble on a player you hadn’t heard of before. Recently, when I was checking out the Chris Jazz Cafe live stream showcasing the Tim Brey Quintet, I discovered Jonathan Ragonese. After doing some further research, I didn’t realize how many players Jonathan has played with, his number of compositions, and his educational endeavors. I wanted to find out more so I reached out to Jonathan and he was nice enough to sit down with me and share his saxophone journey and what he is currently working on now. For those of you who liked to know more about John’s beginnings, see the short bio below:

Biography

  • Jonathan Ragonese was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
  • His next-door neighbors introduced him to the records of Louis Prima and a variety of other recording artists.
  • Shortly after his parents purchased him a tenor saxophone, Jonathan became enamored with a local dance band, The Herm Miller Orchestra where later on John’s parents bought him a clarinet on his twelfth birthday.
  • Jonathan studied saxophone for his first eight years with Susan Loy (professor at York College) as well as piano for over a decade with Fred Van Doren.
  • Jonathan spent his nights during high school learning from Central PA’s rich community in a variety of bars and performance spaces.
  • During this time, Jonathan formed a lasting friendship with mentor, saxophonist Tim Warfield.
  • While attending a summer camp, Jonathan got the opportunity to work with: Garry Dial, Dick Oatts, Jay Anderson and John Riley. This experience – prior to YouTube and social media – gave Jonathan his first understanding of musical life in New York.
  • Jonathan spent the next few years attending jam sessions and transcribing over 250 saxophone solos.
  • In 2007, he began his studies at the Manhattan School of Music studying under Bob Mintzer where he discovered composition, Italian opera, and the works of Giacomo Puccini.
  • Around this time, Jonathan met David Noon – historian, composer, and long-time dean at the Manhattan School of Music and was forever changed.
  • David Noon’s subtle insistence on the systematic study of composition and history helped Jonathan discover poetry and literature.
  • The next ten years in New York City proved fruitful, challenging, and rewarding as Jonathan wrote many volumes worth of unpublished poetry, reading often at public readings and among friends.
  • Jonathan wrote nearly 200 musical works including: sets of Non-poems for chamber musicians, big band and orchestral music, wind quintets, mixed chamber ensembles and a silent-film score for big band (Pandora’s Box).
  • In 2012, Jonathan met Dutch violinist Karen Dekker and they married in 2014.
  • In 2017, Jonathan began teaching at the Wells School of Music as saxophone instructor.
  • In 2020, he joined the faculty full-time as Director of Jazz Studies and Instructor of Saxophone.
  • See extended biography here: https://www.jonathanragonese.com/bio-lengths

Interview

ZS: Who are some of your saxophone influences?

JR: I was interested early on with the music of Louis Prima but particularly with his saxophonist Sam Butera. By the time I chose the saxophone in 4th grade, I remember someone gave me Coltrane’s Ballads album and a Stan Getz album. I was also checking out Sonny Rollins at that time and when I was twelve, I somehow ended up in a bar watching a quartet playing and it happened to be Tim Warfield. Shortly after, Tim became a great mentor and was the first person I could commune with, gain advice from, and asked him who I should listen to because I wanted to be just like Tim.

ZS: As you study the saxophone and work on developing your own sound, what was your process and have you found your voice?

JR: I don’t have a voice and don’t believe in that. I don’t expect to have one necessarily but writing and literature has been a great way for me to check out and consider what the musical influences are about and how we speak musically. Essentially I believe that we can only have the voice we are born with and grow into based on everything we’ve ever loved. Because I was so studious and so intense about trying to mimic and take in these players, I never mimicked anything I didn’t love. I find today with the jazz tradition and current jazz education via the internet, that everyone is so intense with what they have to do as if there is some prescription or set of rules. I think that is foolish because at a certain point in time you are going to get there. If you don’t follow your heart and what you love, then it is futile. When I was studying a wide expanse of players, I wanted to figure out how to speak as clearly as they did.

ZS: What is your approach to teaching? What lessons have you learned over the years that you share with your students?

JR: As a teacher, I have had to work really hard to not be overly self-critical of my approach because I don’t have ‘an approach’. There is a danger – or mindlessness – that comes with having a recipe and it doesn’t work for me. More power to my colleagues that have a recipe or approach but that doesn’t work for me, and I think a student can get more from me if we are able to swim in any direction. I do have a set of general expectations that I set up for the four-year program regardless of what you are studying. This includes certain etudes, pieces, and scales because anything beyond that is too much. My students would say I get very caught up on sound and it’s getting worse; but I am ok with that. One of the things that is hard when you are young is understanding the simplicity of what we are up to as musicians. Being told sound is the only thing that matters is an overstatement, but the development of sound does take care of all the other details. I was eighteen checking out all those Mintzer and Brecker recordings, and it’s not lost on me that when I finally got to study with Bob Mintzer, the emphasis was on simple sound development. I was so excited to study with Bob and the one thing he wanted to talk about was “what are you writing?” and I was not writing yet and that seemed strange to me. But one idea I do remember from my lessons is slow triads up the length of the horn. My stance is trying to help my students wake up and become aware of the situation they are in and learn what it means to be with yourself in the practice room and the deep value you can get from making sound. A teacher in-person is not just for information as you can find much of this in books and on the internet but for exploration of the hard work of how to build yourself. Understanding that playing a long tone for two minutes might just save your musical life because it saved mine.

How you practice is a beaten-down idea, and everybody wants to talk about how you organize yourself but, the real root problem to me is: “has the student discovered the joy of accomplishing something that is repetitive, transcendental and meditative?” If they haven’t, you can divvy up your time all you like and then all you are really doing is divvying up your time and sort of ‘getting to everything’. The organization is not going to make you a better musician, it’s what you are doing with that organization. I am more focused on the feeling you have when you play an overtone and the feeling you experience, because now we are getting somewhere. You have to come back to it every day, otherwise it is not a thing, and that is the real challenge.

ZS: When it comes to a practice routine, how did you develop yours and how do you help students develop their own practice routines?

JR: Over the years for self-organization methodologies, I like to talk about the concept of buckets or areas of responsibilities because there are different areas where you might practice and a solid time with your instrument might touch on all those areas. Sometimes you are more responsible for other things at certain times. A recipe can lead to mindlessness. There is an amazing writer named Ellen J. Langer and along with a few other contemporary people she coined the term ‘mindfulness’ before our culture sucked it up and spewed it out in a terrible way. She is not associated with eastern thought, and she did it in a western scientific lab starting in the 1970’s. Her subject is the difference between mindfulness and mindlessness, and that a recipe can lead to mindlessness.

ZS: In your biography, it’s mentioned that you transcribed 250 saxophone solos. Were there any solos that stood out to you and what was your process?

JR: There are some bootleg recordings from 1961 or 1962 where Coltrane plays one of the ballads in Eb where he has a conversation with himself across two octaves across multiple choruses. I still remember every solo I transcribed. I never set out to memorize them and can sing them no problem but sometimes I will take out my hand-written sheets and can still play 98% of them without blinking and some of those have been twenty plus years ago. All these original Tim Warfield solos I always think are so beautiful. I remember when John Riley – prior to the internet – gave me a CD of the Chris Potter solo masterclass performances and I spent the rest of that jazz camp asking the director if I could skip the classes because I wanted to transcribe ‘All the Things You Are’ and ‘I Hear a Rhapsody’. I think all the Coltrane solos on all the Miles records that end in “in’” are such a deep and valuable resource as it just shows how a band can play. Those records were not prepared records, and they just went in and played the tunes. Coltrane is always in a flow state and everything he says is valuable. I think the Jaco Pastorius birthday concert with Brecker and Mintzer shook me, and Steve Wilson’s “It Could Happen To You” on this Chick Corea Origin band record I remember. There is a recording of Michael Brecker in a quartet live at Jazz Baltica with Pat Metheny, Christian McBride, and Antonio Sanchez that is a real testament to the saxophone. When I transcribed, I used a CD burner that had a remote and I hooked it up to a speaker and could move the track one second at a time. My process was: I came home every day after high school and would go until dinner and transcribe one line at a time until I could play it like they played it.

ZS: Sideman vs. bandleader — which do you prefer and why?

JR: Since I write so much music and so much of this music is in the classical or chamber music world, I didn’t have that many gigs because I was sitting at home reading and writing. When I did have a gig, I was the leader, it had a huge work associated with it, and it had an intense and sometimes terrifying premiere as all the pressure and eyes were on me. If I look at my life, I have mostly been a bandleader but I love being a sideman, but nobody ever calls me much as I am not out there playing enough.

ZS: If you hadn’t pursued music full-time, what other career might you have followed?

JR: I think it’s a sad thing for music that people have an expectation that you have to be doing it all the time to be a professional. That is a drag which shows a lack of musicality in our culture. There was a point in time during my undergrad where I thought that maybe I would go study English. Oddly enough I had never read many books until I was in college where I realized that writing had always somehow been there, but I gave that idea up quickly.

ZS: What projects are you currently working on?

JR: I am working on some concerts with the Dalí String Quartet this coming year. We just recorded a piece by composer and colleague Adam Silverman. I am writing five arrangements for saxophone and string quartet. I’ve recently finished a large bulk of string orchestra music for Emmet Cohen where he played this music in Cuba and Poland. I am starting work on a concert for a young upcoming vocalist Danielle Angrand and Tim Warfield for a concert at the university with a chamber orchestra. The other large project is the big band that I run, The Criterions Jazz Ensemble, is turning 100 years old – the longest running one in the states – so we are having a 100 year celebration.

ZS: What are your thoughts on equipment? How important is equipment and how has your setup evolved?

JR: I want there to be nothing in my way as that is the biggest drag when the equipment gets in your way. Personally, my equipment has evolved, but not so much. Right now, I have been enjoying the Ted Klum Florida 7* for tenor but may look for a different Ted Klum mouthpiece and I recently found the Vandoren Java Red strength 3 reed works for me. I also play the Vandoren leather ligature. On the soprano, I play the Vandoren SL3 and I have six or seven different soprano mouthpieces and I found the Vandoren SL3 gave me everything I wanted. For improvising on soprano, I use the Ted Klum Classic soprano mouthpiece with the Vandoren Klassik ligature.

From a teaching perspective, I recommend the Vandoren line of mouthpieces. I am not endorsed by them but find for the money, quality, reliability and what most students are dealing with from a classical and jazz perspective, the Vandoren mouthpieces work. I cannot tell someone that they should buy a $500 dollar boutique mouthpiece.

Equipment

Soprano:

Tenor:

Connect: