What a joy to spend some time in Athens. I went out to record X Suite by Mark Zadro with pianist Panagiotis Gianakakis. This is the start of a project to record and perform two major works by the Australian composer Mark Zadro – X Suite written in 2009, and a new suite Conspiracy Theories which Mark and I are collaborating on to be completed in 2026.

Panagiotis and I performed X Suite at the International Greek Saxophone Festival in 2024 and it was great to spend a couple of days in his home studio working on the suite again getting it ready to record. Although the Suite can be performed as a solo work, understanding how the two parts work together, working on balance and developing the programmatic ideas was an inspiring process.
It’s always a challenge making sure those musical ideas and interpretation stay at the centre of the recording process, with its many hours of working on sound set up, being more distanced from each other to get a good stereo sound and still maintaining the sense of spontaneity and life that live performance creates naturally. We had the advantage of working at the amazing studio of the University of Athens under the guidance of sound engineer Yannis Malafis.

I am very happy with the sound we captured and am looking forward to working on the edits and creating a recording Panagiotis and I will be proud of.

While I was in Athens I was supported by Yamaha and made plenty of use of the practise rooms at the Yamaha Music School of Nakas Conservatory.

I met up with my Greek saxophone colleagues and their students when I did a talk at the conservatory. I spent some time talking about my recording project and my approach to recording. It was fun demonstrating some of the techniques in X Suite (slap tongue, multiphonics, extended range, manipulation of saxophone harmonics) and talking about how I learned these techniques myself, and how I help my students learn these techniques.