Yakkity Sax: 5 Songs With Great Sax
This week's songs are from Charles Mingus, The Crystals, Destroyer, Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufeld, and Wild Pink
As a carryover from the jazz and swing era, the saxophone held a central place in early rock & roll bands. Before Chuck Berry redefined the roll of the electric guitar, the saxophone was the instrument that took the solos.
Between then and now, the saxophone in a rock & roll context has had its ups (“Shotgun,” Bobby Keys, Clarence Clemons, “Young Americans”, I’ll go out on a limb and say “Baker Street,”) and downs (“Smooth Operator,” Rob Lowe in St. Elmo’s Fire, Tim Cappello in The Lost Boys—both directed by Joel Schumacher oddly enough—“Who Can It Be Now?” and, yes, also “Baker Street”). While bands like Morphine gave an earnest shot at bringing it back into rock & roll respectability, the saxophone suffered a long slow fall from the rock & roll graces into a honking punchline, or a signal for MOR-lite pop.
You can pinpoint the exact moment when modern rock musicians realized the saxophone could be cool again: 11 minutes and 35 seconds into Radiohead’s Kid A. Out from the middle of a sludging bass and drums, a baritone sax, quickly followed by a gaggle of others, cuts right through “The National Anthem.” Not long after, the saxophone found a new place in the mid-2000s indie rock boom. TV on the Radio (whose first release gave a nod to Radiohead by naming their first album OK Calculator) also used the baritone sax-drums-pulsing bass combination in 2004’s “The Wrong Way”. Bon Iver found new ways to incorporate the saxophone as a texture among the lush brush strokes of his more fully realized sound. Fleet Foxes like a good free-jazz freak out every now and again. Springsteen acolytes The War on Drugs spread around the saxophone like chunky peanut butter—textural, but still all over the place. These examples show there is no “right or wrong way” to use a saxophone. It can be just as amazing or just as annoying whether it’s out in front or deep in the mix.
Here are 5 songs with good sax.
“I heard this as a child when I went to meetings with my mother. The congregation gives their testimonial before the Lord. They confess their sins and sing and shout and do a little Holy Rolling. Some preachers cast out demons. They call their dialogue talking in tongues. Language the Devil can understand.” - Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus - “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting”
I’m not necessarily one for absolutes, but this may very well be my favorite jazz recording. There are people who are more musically adept who can explain jazz, about how someone like Coltrane plays “in between the notes”, how Charlie Parker would alter chords and use harmonics, or how to tell if the players are “listening to one another.” You’re welcome to go find them, because I ain’t it.
Typically what I look for in jazz is can you manufacture a mood and sustain it? It’s sort of like asking a toddler to pain you a picture. It doesn’t have to have compositional balance; we’re not looking for verisimilitude; nothing has to be kept within the lines—just offer something that shows you’re putting an idea across. All the chaos and color around that is what gives it life; there are a few spots where everything comes together perfectly, but the rest is feeling around in the dark trying to get to another one.
Having said all that, in “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” you really can hear the band responding to one another, in more ways than one. First and most obvious, there’s Mingus egging his band on with his signature interjections of “Yeah!” and “Alright!”— a precursor to Lil Jon if there ever was one. Mingus was told he “didn’t swing enough” and he “wasn’t black enough to play the blues.” Pulling from his earliest memories and influences, Blues & Roots was his mic-drop of a rebuttal. “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” is the opening track.
The less obvious call-and-responses that are there with the piano echoing the bass introduction before heading off into other directions. They meet back together in the middle section when the piano grabs onto a single note just long enough to catch the bass—that is, until John Handy’s sax sails in over the top of it. The sax stops the other players in their tracks; the only thing they can do is stop and clap along to the beat. The song is tightly wound at points, but it breaks open with the saxophone. It is highly structured and composed, and yet it sounds like utter chaos. The dynamics, the interaction of the instruments, the spontaneity—it’s all there. I can see the full picture. I hope you can too.
““It only occurred to me recently that when Spector called me to play, he could have gotten King Curtis or any saxophonist around. He was a calculating guy. He didn’t pick me because of friendship. I guess I must have had something after all.” - Steve Douglas
The Crystals - “He’s Sure the Boy I Love”
About once a year I remember I’ve got a copy of the Echoes of the 60s Phil Spector compilation that sounds incredible. There’s not a single skipper on it. It’s a refreshing reminder that something doesn’t have to have artistic aspirations to achieve greatness. Similar to something like Back to the Future, these songs don’t bother to concern themselves with anything real; it’s a goof on teenage fantasy perfectly designed to hold your attention for a little while. But also like Back to the Future, it’s just as great whether you’re 7 or 70, and it awakens that part of your imagination that thinks about a time before you existed, where things seem a lot more simple and innocent, but in reality actually aren’t all that different.
The saxophone functions as a dramatic exclamation point in the prelude and then carries on the “Runaround Sue”-like melody at the end. It’s the template matched in The Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron.” It’s quintessential “Wall of Sound,” especially when The Crystals are singing their “Sha-la-la-la Hey-Heys” but there’s a few spots in the sax solo where the wall shows a few cracks revealing just piano, drums, and a tambourine. The recording was arranged by Jack Nitzche, who became a close friend and collaborator with Neil Young (among others) and would go on to write the Oscar-winning “Up Where We Belong” with his wife Buffy Sainte-Marie. Playing the sax is Steve Douglas of the famed Wrecking Crew. That’s him on “Peter Gunn,” pretty much any Beach Boys song, among many other hits, and my favorite credit of his: Bob Dylan’s “True Love Tends to Forget” from the highly underrated Street Legal.
“I was thinking of other languages and their use of the word ‘cataract’. Like, in French, it’s a rupture, it’s a waterfall. Or in King Lear, there’s a famous scene in which he’s finally betrayed by all his daughters and stripped of his entourage, and he rushes out in the middle of an insane storm. He’s like, ‘Open up, you cataracts.’ And it’s this moment of reckoning, where you realize that the world is broken.” - Dan Bejar
Destroyer - “Cataract Time”
Destroyer’s primary artistic force/front-man Dan Bejar sounds like the voice in your head if you were an art gallery owner on the moon. He exudes a mystique and sophisticated affectation in a way that can’t not be a put-on, but he never gives it away. If LCD Soundsystem is Late-Night Cocaine, Destroyer is Day-Spa Champagne.
You could pull any number of Destroyer songs to fit this theme, as the lulling and atmospheric layers of saxophone wash over their music across multiple albums. So how about one from the recently released Dan’s Boogie? There’s a watery dribbling of some type of possibly stringed instrument (is it a harp? A marimba?) that follows a piano line and drums, marching across the track, getting a little more plodding by the minute. Throw on a good pair of headphones and join me in appreciating the slight variations on those drums as the song floats by. It’s never that clear what Bejar is singing about, but he’s usually lost and adrift. About halfway through just after he prepares “to live to see another day,” the saxophone enters and adds the relief he’s been seeking. A long, soft exhale fading out into the distance while the sun rises.
“Simply put: [I focus on] creating a supersaturation of time-space that attacks the senses in a way where it forces a listener to be absolutely present and to shut down that aspect of our brains which is seeing into the future or the past, constantly contemplating future and past. Future past future past… at the detriment of the present moment. So the idea behind everything that I do is to try to create a new a kind of unavoidable now.” - Colin Stetson
Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufeld - “The Rest of Us” (Live)
Saxophonist Colin Stetson has worked with TV on the Radio, Bon Iver, Feist, Tom Waits, and Arcade Fire—the last of which is where he met violinist Sarah Neufeld. Stetson uses a circular breathing technique that produces an otherworldly sound. He’s cited Jimi Hendrix as his earliest, biggest influence. Like Hendrix, Stetson’s work redefines what his chosen instrument is capable of doing.
I first saw Stetson as an opener for Russian Circles at Millennium Park, where I and a bunch of metal nerds were dumbfounded as to how one guy and a saxophone could simultaneously sound like a malfunctioning spaceship and the monster eating it. Collaborating with Sarah Neufeld, they released Never Were the Way She Was the following year. Bear in mind that this is only a saxophone and a violin, then set aside any assumptions you might have. I find the whole album haunting and transfixing. As quoted above, Stetson absolutely delivers on his goal to render the listener "absolutely present.” I’ve included the live version here, because it sounds just like the album version, and seeing does not necessarily make for believing. But it is something to behold, particularly how he creates the percussive elements.
“I came up with the main guitar part for this while trying to learn The English Beat — ‘Save It for Later.’ Then I played some MIDI sax on it like a keyboard — the demo has some densely stacked trashy sax parts, but ultimately I asked Adam Schatz to play real sax on it. The chorus reminds me of Jurassic Park a little bit.” - John Ross
Wild Pink - “Disintegrate”
Wild Pink’s most recent album Dulling the Horns offers an indie rock version of what I mentioned above about jazz—can you establish a mood and sustain it? The album offers a guitar fuzz and white-guy resignation that holds over the course of the album. As the Pitchfork review very perfectly put it, “it sounds a bit like J Mascis produced a Bruce Springsteen album.” Plus, it’s got amusing lyrics like this:
There must be a long ass German word
For when you’ve destroyed something good
Something you used to love
But had to let go of
Playing sax on “Disintegrate” is Adam Schatz, whose credits include Vampire Weekend, Japanese Breakfast, Father Figures, and enough other artists to be described as an “Indie Rock Zelig.” Like “Snake Plant” by Hurray for the Riff Raff (one of my favorite songs from last year), the saxophone in the song suggests a wider lens. It’s like when a landscape painter uses splashes of orange and green in what at first looks like a gray and blue cloud. It’s more for effect than it is for you direct attention. There’s a softening around the edges, with a goal of not drawing attention to itself.
Thanks for reading. Enjoy listening. Share some good covers.
Full playlists of songs featured in 5 Songs: