In the world of joking around, all saxophones are bad, all saxophone playing is bad, all music for saxophones is bad -- if not bad, then sappy, schlocky, saccharine, etc.
In the real world, wonderful music can come from saxophones & saxophonists just as it can from all the other instruments & the people who play them.
Saxophones are not automatically all good. Saxophones are not automatically all bad. Ditto saxophone music. Ditto horns & horn music.
I like the idea behind the Schickele Mix radio program, a show unfortunately no longer in production but still aired in reruns on lots of public radio stations. (And, hey, if you haven't heard a particular installment yet, then it's new to you even if I've already heard it 4 or 5 times.) Anyway, each Schickele Mix show starts off this way: This is a program dedicated to the proposition that All Musics Are Created Equal. Or, as Duke Ellington put it, if it sounds good, it is good.
I don't care much for the music of Kenny G. That does not condemn all soprano saxophone music in my book. If you have not yet heard The Nuclear Whales Saxophone Orchestra, or The London Saxophonic, or The Washington Saxophone Quartet, give them a listen before giving all sax music a blanket condemnation.
And if you listen to All Things Considered afternoons on National Public Radio, then you have most likely already heard The Washington Saxophone Quartet. They recorded a dozen or so of those little musical breaks that the program uses between show segments. They didn't get paid for it, either, as I understand it. They just bartered those special ATC arrangements & those recorded performances in exchange for a period of use of the local public radio station's professional audio recording studios. The guy who did the arrangements & who plays baritone saxophone with The Washington Saxophone Quartet is also Associate Conductor of the City of Fairfax Band in Virginia -- http://www.fairfaxband.org Besides playing bari with the quartet, he plays alto & tenor with various concert & jazz bands. I've heard him solo on soprano sax sounding way better than Kenny G., & with much more robust technique, too, plus a fuller, rounder saxophone tone -- not that thin, fishy, reedy, poor-man's-oboe sound you sometimes hear coming out of soprano saxophones. (I gues that's why the jazz folks call them "fish horns," eh?) When the guy's not waving baton with Fairfax Band, he's playing trumpet in the Fairfax Band trumpet section. Not only is he pretty good at trumpet for a saxophonist, he's pretty good at trumpet, period. Somebody told him once that reed players can't double on brass instruments. So he decided to find out for himself whether that's true. In his case, it isn't.
-AC. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Can you play the sax as well as Kenny G?
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