Nowadays when a professional saxophonist or a student above Grade 8 is trying to find recordings of the pieces he is working on, he is able to find many different versions of a high quality standard to choose from. However, what happens when students from lower levels, such as grades 3 to 5 want to do the same? The answer is easy: they don’t have an access to the same recording material and when they do, it lacks quality and variety. The very little amount of material they can find is often outdated (90’s or earlier) or it is very poor quality amateur recordings found on Youtube. These are interpretations that students and teachers shared selflessly with the community by uploading them on the Internet.

Breath and Play Saxophone was born with these problems in mind and with the recurring necessity to offer an answer to our students. A project with a sole objective: to create high quality learning material, specific for saxophone and piano and addressed to students from Grade 2 to 5.

Our project is backed up with our intensive experience as tutors, and the obvious necessity to fill in a learning gap that has been neglected until now. The specific pieces chosen for this project have two very clear characteristics: the versions recorded have to be of high-interest and motivational for our students and have to cover specific and varied technical difficulties that will make students improve their instrument performance skill to its full potential.

It should be mentioned that the saxophone repertoire for elementary levels has stopped growing lately. Very few composers write for young students and to help to solve this we would like to commission new pieces to composers who have agreed to join our project.

Lastly, in order to facilitate the recordings’ study, we are going to add the backing tracks of the recordings in WAV format to the CD. We believe that this is an interesting method for studying not only in the class, but also as a self-study tool. Moreover, it’s a system that students already know and are familiar with. This is due to the fact that the majority of current saxophone teaching methods include a CD with backing tracks of different songs.