SAXOPHONE : PROS & CONS

 Before you:

• buy one sax
• learn how to play
• decide to become a saxophonist

be aware of the pros and cons of that marvellous, unique but also diabolic musical instrument. Looking at it by a positive and optimistic perspective, let’s begin with the:

 PRO’S :

 1 • It’s a beautiful instrument (this one is consensual, I think…). The sax family goes from the huge bass saxophone, passing by all the classical voices: baritone, tenor, alto, soprano and sopranino.

      The shape can vary, and recently they bended the neck of sopranos, or straighted the normally curved altos and tenors. Novelties include lacquer finishing in the color that pleases you the most, like it happens now with the cymbals of the jazz drums kit, adding a lot of models to choose, besides the traditional gold or silver finishing 

2 • It has a wide range of capabilities due to its characteristics:

      Greatly Expressive (perhaps the most expressive instrument, after human voice): You can whisper, ‘talk’ sweet, be mellow, happy, sad & blue, nostalgic, sensual, aggressive, sexy, melancholic, authoritary, insidious, provocative, angry, cheerful, you name it…

      You can laugh, scream, honk, whistle, squeak, growl, mumble, tell a story, blow a siren, imitate birds, create snaps, crashes, stomps, squeezes. Express your feelings and emotions trough the horn - the limits depend only upon your technique, breathing resources and mastering control over the instrument.    

3 • It has some mystic charisma of its own associated with its image. Being a rather recent invention - around 130 years ago (by Adolphe Sax, a Belgium musician/inventor), compared with the 1400 years of the trumpet or the 800 of the clarinet, the saxophone is merely a baby…!

      The history of the saxophone mingles closely with the history of Jazz itself, as it became one of the top favorite instruments of jazz musicians to improvise with. As result of his “modernity”, there’s only a few classical compositions that included the saxophone (Saint-Saens and a few others). Amongst contempory composers it’s been much more represented, but it was in the newly formed “Jazz bands”, at the beginning of the XXth century, that our horn began his promising carrier.

     Since those times, by the hands of talented people like Lester Young, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Illinois Jacquet, Louis Jordan, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons, Benny Golson, Hank Mobley, Junior Cook, Johnny Hodges, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Johnny Griffin, Lockjaw Davis, Roland Kirk, Cannonball Adderley, Stanley Turrentine, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson, Phil Woods, Gerry Mulligan, Charles Lloyd, Archie Shepp, Lucky Thompson, King Curtis, Michael Brecker, Joshua Redman, just to name a few (these are the ones that came first at my mind, so it’s not a qualitative ordered selection of any kind), the saxophone has been brought to the podium of the major and most important musical instruments of modern times, along with the eternal piano (nowadays with a immense paraphernalia of keyboard-based electronic instruments), and the electric guitar.

     There’s an handicap factor on the sax: not being able to produce simultaneous notes, or in a more simple way, saxes can’t deliver chords, but on the other hand the other major two instruments referred above depend on electric power to work, and the acoustic piano it’s not very portable and light-weight, like an horn is…    

4 • In my opinion it’s also the instrument that can better express (except for the voice, of course) the personal sound of the musician, easily showing his individuality, his originality, the tone that permits one to guess who’s playing, in a much more direct and immediate way, than the one that happens with other horns, pianos, guitars, basses, drums or percussion’s. It’s easier (for me, at last, but being a sax player does have a lot to do with it) to recognize the sax players than the other musicians, in a blindfold test - probably everybody knows what it is, being able to tell who’s playing, without looking at the record cover sleeves,  only by hearing  the musicians styles. Down Beat magazine always have a page with the results and the comments of a well-known jazz musician about a blindfold test proposed to him, over eight to ten theme recordings.

      But anyway I think it’s harder to discover at once the differences between two piano players, and remember, in a Jazz festival, for instance, all pianists use the same piano that’s on stage, but horn player bring their own axes, with their own choice of mouthpieces, and their own choice of reeds (all this helps to get different sonorities, at start…).          

5 • It’s very versatile: Saxes do fit in Marching Band parades, on the stage of any Pop, Rock or easy-listening show, they’re one of the main protagonists on a Jazz or Blues band/orchestra, they are resourceful a Capella improvisators, if needed. They manage even to integrate a few Classical repertoire, as said before, and a much more vast participation in the Contempory one.

      They are essential members of the horn section of any Rhythm’n Blues or Soul star singer’s band, and match very well with a trumpet and a trombone. Also adopted with success by Bossa Nova, Fusion, Salsa and Afro-Cuban styles.  It’s usually played simply and beautifully in a acoustic way, but you can , with a microphone, pass his sound into phasers, delays, chorus, echo, reverbs, octaver, wha-wha and a myriad of other sound processors, even triggering midi digital equipment. Musicians like John Surman, John Klemmer, Gary Thomas and Eddie Harris do have several records with a wide variety of experimenting in sax sound processing. Special microphones and transducers have been made created to get the complex sound produced by saxophones, because unlike the trumpet and brass family, in witch the sound comes only trough the bell, on the sax sound comes also from the tube holes, besides the bell of the instrument body.

    Electronic musical instrument factories copied its fingering (Bohem) system, used also in their cousins clarinets and flutes, to make the modern Wind MIDI Controllers (wx7, ewi, midisax, etc…), producing a step forward in synthetic sound solo utilization, because the precision of the lip on the reed allied with the air pressure coming from the lungs process made far better expressive results than the one’s obtained by the modulation and pitch bend knobs of the regular keyboard synthesizers. There are groups and ensembles based only on saxes, and saxophone trios, quartets and quintets have been widely developed.

      What other instrument can claim a similar variety of utilization and versatility? Only the trumpet can show also a good resumé, but didn’t went so far as saxophone in some areas, like in the fifties Rock’n Roll, when the sax was the king, not the trumpet and not yet the electric guitar, that needed almost a decade to take the main role of soloist (in Rock, I mean).    

6 • In several kinds or typologies of music, like Jazz or Blues, passing from Soul to Salsa or from     Pop to World Fusion, and when you have a sax solo, there’s where the music climax happens, it’s during the sax improvisation that the band reaches the peak on a tune (probably 90% of the times). The intensity begins to grow from the start of a track, along with complexity and number of instruments, leading to one or two solos developed over the tunes change sequence, (as an example, a guitar solo and a sax solo, on a Blues band), and normally - depending on those soloists abilities, of course, this is a hypothetical standard situation - the ultimate climax happens at 3/4 of the sax solo length - one of the things that contributes for that is the fact that when the sax is soloing, the guitar usually is also playing, making the support for the sax solo, otherwise in the guitar solo, when the sax is in silence (or sometimes can be doing some kind of riffs).

      So there are more instruments involved at the sax solo than in any other solo - and that’s hard for the saxophonist, I can tell you, you have to overplay all the band, to make your solo audible over the accompaniment, and normally, if you are getting a good impro, the others get exited as result of that, and tend to play louder and fill all the space, witch aggravates the situation of the sax player… After the end of the sax solo, the verse, refrain and riffs are repeated, in a similar way of the beginning of the song, or in some cases, using the elan from the solo, the band maintains some dynamic energy, pulse and intensity finishes with some kind of accentuation’s, breaks or unison melody ending vamp.   

     So the sax has (or can have) a very important and distinguished role in the overall performance of a band, and in resume of the PRO’S, when it’s well played, with a consistent, good intonation, articulation and personalized sonority, it’s definitely a king over the stage during a concert show! So far, so good…    

…..(continues in 2nd part: Con’s) 

 R.A.