
If you liked “The Goon Show,” “The Simpsons,” and David
Bowie’s music since childhood, it will have instilled that saxophones are
expressive, outrageous, and cool. This is before you even get to jazz, where
the objective appears, sometimes, to blow your aching soul through a brass tube.
When Adolphe Sax patented his woodwind instrument a hundred
and sixty years ago last Tuesday, they were intended for use in marching bands
and orchestras. Sax would later suffer from lip cancer for a five-year period,
years before his invention would use the blues to capture that pain.
People have always found ways of getting that bit more out
of the saxophone, which changed to suit, its keys moving from the initial
oboe-inspired layout to make playing both easier and faster. Its position
between conventional brass and woodwind instruments also meant new orchestral
pieces could be written using saxophones to blend these sounds together.
As jazz and pop music developed to incorporate its
particular sound, the sax was seemingly the “next” instrument to include – once
you have your guitars, keyboard and drums, the sax is the next easiest
instrument to learn, before you get into the vagaries of finger positioning on
the violin, and sorting out your embouchure on a trumpet.
However, you cannot deny that anyone playing a saxophone
does look good. You are not stood or sat “behind” the instrument, you can bring
it into your body, or hold it out, and its sound is not usually put in the “background”
of anything – if you are playing, you are out in front, as people want to hear
it.
I know I would have years of practice ahead of me to make
all of this sound true, but expressing yourself means you have to start
expressing yourself. I shouldn’t mind, however, if all I get to begin are
squeaks and squawks, as some people did pretty well out of that.
In a 1983 interview, David Bowie talked about becoming a
working musician by playing the saxophone, seeing this as his way out of
London, and into America, particularly the 1960s West Coast, Beat Generation
counterculture with which he associated the instrument’s sound. However:
“…When I started working with it… I found I didn’t have a
very good relationship with the sax and that lasted right the way through.
We’re sort of pretty embittered with each other. It lies there waiting for me
to touch it. It defies me to... I really have to go through traumas to get
anything out of it that anything to do with what I want it to say. So it’s not
a steady relationship; it’s not a good one. It really is a love / hate
relationship.”
Either he or his sax needed to back off.
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