Sic Semper Tyrannis

On the Use of Saxophone in Rock n' Roll

Listening to Supertramp on loan from the library the other day clarified something for me.

There is no musical sound I hate more than rock n’ roll saxophone. (Think Billy Joel’s “Say Goodbye to Hollywood.” Think all manner of Billy Joel songs actually.) Or that awful Jackson Browne song about life on the road that turns into “Stay,” I think there’s sax on that one…

There’s just this stereotypical sound I’m thinking of. It’s really harsh, maybe due to metal mouthpieces. Think of Lenny Pickett in the Saturday Night Live Band with some kind of vague 50’s nostalgia. You hear it about 2/3 of the way through live songs in the late seventies. There’s a IV chord and the crowd roars right as the sax player, (unheard in the song up until that point), plays some pickups into some manufactured emotional moment. That’s the “rock n’ roll sax sound” I’m talking about and it makes my skin crawl like a thousand microscopic, mechanical robot bugs living in my epidermis.

With only a couple of exceptions, rock n’ roll is no place for saxophone. In fact I think that harsh, piercing sound probably came about so as to cut through the mix of your typical rock n’ roll band.

It’s really just guitar envy. Just like the keytar was.

What’s funny is that I really like the sound of saxophone in jazz contexts: Charlie Parker, Joe Henderson, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, even weird old Roland Kirk. I’m totally down with all of that. But when you match the instrument with a backbeat, something horrible happens in the translation.

Notable exceptions: whoever played on Lou Reed’s “Wild Side.” The airy sax tone on that song is totally grooving. Also, the horn arranging by Chicago in the 70s. They had a sound all their own that thankfully didn’t include that 50’s pastiche sax sound.

And I’m a little bit on the fence about Pink Floyd’s use of saxophone in songs like “Money,” “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” and “Dogs of War,” (off the largely overlooked Momentary Lapse of Reason album.) I can go either way in that argument. The soprano sax on “Terminal Frost” off of Lapse of Reason, however, is pure bliss.

On a somewhat related note, bearing the previous in mind, it’s probably no surprise that I’m not a fan of the album Ghost in the Machine by The Police. Sting thought he would try his hand at the saxophone and the result is all over the album—saxophone as riff generator. Not quite as cloying as the “Billy Joel sax sound” described above, but still a weak moment in comparison with the general awesomeness of the rest of the Police’s music.

posted by Mike @ 10:08 AM