I remember seeing the Screaming Honkers in Dan Lynch's in 1980 or '81, and the sax player was doing a solo to "Sea Cruise" lying on his back on the bar, spinning around. And I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Of course I was 16 (Which was the defacto drinking age when the legal age was 18). The instrument has a heavy symbolic freight. It connotes soul and authenticity. That Clarence Clemons, a black man in a white band, is the sort of archetypical rock saxophone player only adds to this. WHat I'm driving at is that the sax is as much a token of some values as it is an actual contributor to the sound. Oh, and when Stevie Ray Vaughn added the sax on the second album, it didn't do it for me.
I was in Nashville earlier this year, and I came up with a similar theory about the use of the synthesizer in any music that could be called "country." And I also decided that Gretchen Wilson is alright with me. The first idea didn't surprise me, the second one did.
"Off my rocker" is an unhappy phrase in this context.
I thought it was a bad pun. My point was kind of buried. A lot of sax on rock albums is bad because it is there not to sound good, but to represent an idea or value.
Sonny Rollins does the sax solo on the rolling stone song "waiting on a friend".
"Baker Street" was 1978. I like the sax solo quite a bit - also the contrasting guitar solo.
This post has inspired me to look for saxaphone in my rock collection, which thankfully led me to listen to Medium Medium's "So Hungry, So Angry" again.
Some new bands are even using the sax. Love Is All use the instrument a fair amount in their debut, and Man Man also has it in a few songs (though that's not fair, as they really have damn near every instrument in some song).
I can't say I really like the idea of solos much, but the saxaphone can certainly be pleasant as part of the band.
How about that St. Elmo's Fire? Is that a great flick or what?
Another prominent user of the saxophone is Captain Beefheart.
There's some rocking sax in Dave Matthews Band's music.
Errr... Thanks, Ben. That's what I get for being raised by Homer "Saxamaphone" Simpson.
Also, straying from more clear-cut Rock (which, to be fair, Man Man and Captain Beefheart already were), there's very prominent saxophone in TV on the Radio, especially "The Wrong Way".
Hell, the sax is also used by Menomena, The Coral, and Islands. It's become a perfectly acceptable instrument to use for rock (though still a little weird, like all brass).
a little weird, like all brass
Don't rag on the ska, man.
So ... are we to understand that you meant 9 seriously, Matt?
Further research reveals that Mr. Argue has studied with John Hollenbeck, of whom I approve, but I still think his "opinions" concerning the saxophone in rock have been formed on the basis of a far too narrow sample.
I have a vestigial fondness for the Dave, as it made up a large slice of the soundtrack of my youth; however, I do find the saxophoning eminently mockable.
So, no.
I used to play saxophone in a rock band so I was one of those villains. It can work or can't work, depending on band, song, sax player, etc.: just like any other instrument. Brass and woodwind, in general, sounds pretty damn good to me in a non-jazz/non-classical context.
What about going the other way? The guitar in jazz?
What's so special about that? Guitars have been part of jazz forever. (But I also think, though I'm less certain, that saxes have been part of rock for a while, though they may have had periods of unpopularity.)
re: 16
I know re: the history of jazz guitar. I also play jazz guitar [not very well] but I know a lot of pianists and horn players who are pretty negative about jazz guitar --- both for it's alleged tonal limitations and because of the alleged poverty of jazz guitarists' improvisation. I don't agree, but it's a view I hear fairly often.
Rock sax -- well, arguably sax has been in rock'n'roll right since the beginning. All the early jump jive/jump blues stuff, the stuff that segued into what we think of as rock'n'roll, featured saxophone playing.
Brass is where the action's at. That's how you know those Mexican music videos kick ass. They're busting out tubas and shit.
The criticism of saxophone being used in rock is a venerable one -- I'm pretty sure such a criticism is made in Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963) -- I may be misremembering and the criticism is of guitar played as if it were a saxophone, or something similar.
Yes -- now I am thinking he (or rather his character, which I'm not sure who was speaking -- it was during the "Bird Lives" scene) was criticising jazz guitarists for trying to play sax solos instead of bringing something unique to the music. In which regard, consider Django Reinhardt -- not your average jazz guitarist but surely a counter-example if one is needed.
Surf music has a lot of sax solos, which in one case I remember only had two notes, probably E and A (three if you cound low A and high A as two notes.) Surf music was very minimalist and DIY. The only title I can remember is "Wild Weekend", but that wasn't the two-note song.
Van Morrison has often made good use of the sax. "Rock" is kind of a loose category, though, and I'm not sure whether he'd count.
Of course this Darcy individual lacks credibility somewhat, as s/he apparently doesn't think that "Aja" is even tolerable.)
Aja isn't so much objectively bad as grievously disappointing in the greater scheme of Steely Dan.
What's the yardstick here? Guitar solos? There are twenty times as many guitar solos as sax in rock, and twenty times as many total crap in consequence. But the sheer number means that everybody can think of a good few great ones in among the dross. If guitars hadn't taken over the music so completely in the 60s, I don't think this would be a question.
BTW Darcy is a he (I believe he has a second gig as Mr Lindsey Beyerstein).
There's a link somewhere in there to twenty bad 80s sax solos. That's cheating; those songs were already crap when the sax started playing.
Hm, Mr. Lindsey Beyerstein is now in Cannon Falls MN. I also didn't know that Nirvana recorded there.
Also, The Bad Plus, are teh suck.
I saw them a couple of years ago and was distinctly underwhelmed.
there have to be orders of magnitude more guitar solos in rock than saxophone solos, not merely 20x. I think the saxophone adds a lot to the x-ray spex, cementing the random "well, I know this one guy who can kind of play drums" feeling of the band, and providing a counterpoint to the brassy vocal stylings of polly styrene. she was all the cooler for having hideous braces. and I like ska.
I don't get the anti-jazz guitar thing. What are those people thinking?
Just to change the subject, what about Hammond B3 and Fender Rhodes? Love 'em or hate 'em?
That squawky punk sax is great. Loads of late 70s/early-80s new-wave bands use it. The Zutons do something a bit similar with sax now, in a more mainstream way.
Also, I'd just like to mention Hazel o'Connor: Will You, from Breaking Glass.
The sax on the X-Ray Spex's records definitely works. The trouble with ska is that I think anyone pushing the line that rock sax sucks would argue that ska isn't rock. As 22 suggests, the whole thing is a bit rigged; most popular music styles that sound good with sax are waved out of the category of "rock" in various ways.
(About the ska craze of some years ago, the record industry scum quoted in The New York Times put it best: "More than dance music, the sound at the conference most recently scooped out of its pocket and onto the pop charts was ska, one of the few longtime underground genres that -- despite two great ska showcases at the festival -- the cognoscenti in the business refuse to take seriously, explore or even discuss in a sentence that doesn't end with 'all the same' or 'be happy when that's over.'" And thank god, it is.)
ahem.
I didn't say we had to get all barenaked ladeez about everything.
no, wait. that music isn't plausibly rock, although it is undeniably awesome. does it only count if white people play it? I like an italian ska band called i meganoidi.
ahem.
The link exemplifies why I referred to the ska craze of recent years, not ska itself.
does it only count if white people play it?
Not quite, but close. At the risk of making this into a very tedious thread, a discussion about "rock" that doesn't take into account the racially charged nature of that and other music marketing terms . . . but this has been covered elsewhere. Anyway, what's up with the talk about Hall and Oates in some of the comments at the second link? Hall and Oates are not, and never were, rock. They were Philly soul wannabes turned synth pop.
Saxophone works fine in rock, but I'd wager that saxophone solos are easier to screw up than other kinds of solos. Too easy to make them go on and on without showcasing real talent or contributing to the rest of the piece.
26/30: Lora Logic's post-X-Ray Spex band, Essential Logic, is really wonderful, too. (She was the sax player in the live band, although not on "Germ Free Adolescents".) I think Kill Rock Stars put a compilation out a few years ago.
BTW, am I right in thinking that Lady Madonna was an abomination and that Ronnie Scott should have been ashamed of himself for having anything to do with it?
Cala, I think it's just as easy to screw up guitar solos for the reasons you suggest. Jerry Garcia practically made a career out of it, and I liked his stuff.
I'm not sure what various folks are counting as rock, but I can't imagine a better sax solo than the one King Curtis does in the Coaster's "Brand New Suit."
There's decent sax in the Memphis Horns-influenced horn playing on the Stones's Exiles on Main Street. And, from the 80s, Jim Spake's contribution to Alex Chilton's odd combeback albums is pretty good.
BW: Even if I'm not particularly scared of you correcting my grammar, I'm still terrified of saying something stupid about music around you.
But the guitar in jazz question: though it has been around forever, and you have your traditional type jazz guitar sound. But occasionally I'll hear guitar in jazz that sounds a lot more like rock guitar transplanted into a jazz song than what I think of as jazz guitar, and sometimes they work, and sometimes it's just wrong. (ummm, I'm bad with examples. Maria Schneider's Wyrgly?)
So, I found that question interesting, nattarGcM, but you're so, so wrong about the Bad Plus. I was listening to them when I clicked over here.
King Curtis and Jr. Walker are R&B, right?
There's a really wide range of jazz guitar, so the question baffles me. Take Charley Christian, Barney Kessel, Ralph Towner, John McLaughlin, James Blood Ulmer, and Sonny Sharrock -- no two are at all alike. Musically Wes Montgomery is sort of lame, is thta what people are thinking of?
Australian trio Giddy Motors makes excellent use of the rock sax.
I endorse the notion, typical of old guys here, that sax has always been in Rock somewhere. I think archetypical ideas of what rock is and isn't go back to British invasion. Only one of the big groups that first year or so had a sax player — Dave Clark Five — and it wasn't the best. So it started to be thought extraneous, impure. It is hard to think of how it would be used all the time, in nearly every song, though. Considering the great variety of sounds and techniques that bands have used at one time or another, but usually not core, I'd say sax is just outside the inner circle, usable more than once-in-a-while, but not always.
What's the yardstick here? Guitar solos?
I don't particularly care about solos. I think the Stick Men employed a saxophonist (pronounced "saxOPHonist"). No, they didn't; whatever.
re: 39
Well, I agree with you. I like jazz guitar. I spend a great deal of my spare time trying to get better at being one. I have this ongoing intermittent project to learn how to play jazz guitar chronologically -- I've started with the 30s swing players and Django and I'm working my way forward. It's still early days, though.
But there is a lot of snobbery about guitar among some jazz players -- I have two friends who are both pretty good jazz pianists who've both expressed that view to me. Perhaps the snobbery is partly because of the association with rock [one that obviously post-dates the use of guitar in jazz by 20 or more years]. Perhaps it comes partly from the heroic image of the horn player as the quintessential improvising genius that has built up around a number of sax and trumpet players since the 50s.
re: 38
The Bad Plus, when I saw them, were just monotonous. There was no subtlety and no groove and they had one dynamic happening, all evening. I was really wanting to like their stuff -- on paper it sounds like it would be right up my alley -- but the live execution just didn't do it for me.
39:"Musically Wes Montgomery is sort of lame, is thta what people are thinking of?" Yes, but late 40s Wes is interesting, and there are, IIRC, a couple good Blue Note albums.
Barney Kessel was a name I was trying to think of last night, and there is at least one 50s Jazz guitarist that is slipping my mind.
38:McLaughlin, on the Miles albums, was pretty rockin'. And the guy that followed him, Agharta & Pangaea era.
Grant Green
True Blue Note sound;great hard bop
Tal Farlow More than Montgomery, this guy was interesting in late 40s Bebop
Jim Hall I could never get into the West Coast sound
I am not just looking these guys up; I have listened to them; just been away from Jazz for a year. And I am into the 50s hard bop stuff, which is probably not Emerson's or w-lfs-n's preference.
I have something up on my site about the early history of electric guitar. It's pretty amazing -- the electric guitar came from the middle of nowhere (Waukesha, Muskogee, Oklahoma City, LA area, back when LA was the boonies.)
As far as my research took me, the first electric blues guy was T-Bone Walker, and his style is sort of smooth and jazzy. The real gutsy stuff came later.
Re 44:
I think I might have had an extra "so" or two in my comment. I can see they wouldn't be right for everyone, and having seen them live a couple of times, it doesn't really add as much as I would have liked, which seems to be your experience of them.
Also, this got me thinking that with a song called "Anthem for the Earnest", Ogged might like them.
But then I started scanning the comments, and thought "not so much."
re: 48
I read your blog article.
Interesting. Actually, none of these 4 or 5 people were the first people to record on the electric guitar. There were others -- I have a box set of early jazz guitar that features a few players who predate these people and who were using electrics. Eddie Durham, in particular, predates them all and introduced the electric guitar to Charlie Christian. Durham is a pretty amazing player as well. Much neglected.
That Barney Kessel stuff, with Julie London, is great though.
Matt, what is the box set. I have a box set of early stuff, not including Durham.
Christian was the first person to do stuff on electric guitar that people had to listen to. As it's been told to me, Durham and the other early jazz guitarists were role-players.
ttaM, what I meant was: Tell me the name of your box set.
The box set is called Hittin' on All Six.
It has 4 discs, only one of which is pre-Charlie Christian and includes a mix of people playing acoustic and electric. The other discs cover the Charlie Christian period and immediately after. The set covers the period from the late 20s through to the early 50s.
Hanoi Rocks, you bastards. And the Sonics.
Matt's friends are basically right on the generality of jazz guitarists, unfortunately. Guitar players are almost always very poor and thoughtless improvisers. Rather like sitcoms, there are some fantastic ones but in general, they're dreadful.
In addition to X-Ray Specs and the Sonics;
Fear.
re: 54
There is some truth in what they say, but also a lot of snobbery.
Improvising fluently on the guitar is in some ways easier than other (monophonic) instruments and in other ways much harder. That tends to lend itself to a certain vulnerability to cliché. I'm certainly not immune from that -- I'm a fairly basic improviser with a lot to learn.
However, the best guitarists are the equal of any other instrumentalists. Hackneyed improv on the saxophone or tumpet is pretty common too.
Bill Haley. Comets. Rock. Clock comma Around The.
Featuring one Joey Ambrose on tenor saxophone, if Wikipedia gets the credit right.
So yes, definitively, sax has been part of rock and roll since the very beginning.
And hey, if anyone else is still posting down here, splain me this: why do people love love love accordion in zydeco and hate hate hate it almost anywhere else?
Jazz guitarists are common in small gigs in London when there isn't a piano; some of them are quite good - Colin Oxley - some aren't. I got into trouble over the summer when I said I didn't like the live jazz guitar tone - I'd like to hear more echo, more open strings, less "tight-arse" stuff.
Sax in "rock"? Louis Jordan? Rudy Pompilli?
Whoever played sax on the first two Johnny & the Hurricanes albums was pretty good, if basic (which is good, too) and I remember seeing George Thorogood in the early 80s with a sax player who sounded just like the J & the H's man.
Steve Douglas with Duane Eddy & then P Spector? Untouchable. Oh, Ace Cannon with Bill Black - "The untouchable sound".
Jim Horn with Duane Eddy? Not so much.
The sax on Eddy's "Peter Gunn" wasn't Douglas, it was a jazz player who overdubbed the part in a different studio, a jazz player with "G" in his name that I can't remember and Google lies. Ah, Gil Bernal, he remembered.
Oh, and Noble "Thin Man" Watts, Herb Hardesty & Lee Allen.
Even Gary Barnacle has sounded good from time to time. So, Sax in Rock? Hell yes.
Bill Haley of course tried the accordion. Not so successful.
58 -- I like accordion in zydeco and elsewhere.
While it may well be true that the saxophone solos of whatever sort of group the groups on that list are were not good, why would you conclude from that fact that "rock sax" is to be disdained?
This reminds me of a discussion from a while about how it's so unfair that disco is maligned for not being especially funky. Sure, there's one well-known exception (Chic) and hundred of others lurking around various stages of semi-obscurity, but seriously, when I say "disco," what kind of beat immediately springs to mind?
Similarly, when I say "rock sax," does Thinking Plague actually pop into your head before anything else? Really? I have a feeling you may be alone there, Ben. In fact, I think you'll find that the exception does not, in fact, generally prove the rule.
Which is not to say that you didn't name some interesting exceptions -- I wouldn't know, having never even heard of this Motor Totemist Guild of which you speak. But I'll do my due diligence and check 'em out at some point.
Anyway, it's not that I don't sympathize with the dilemma of the rock sax aficionado, it's just that examples of tolerable rock sax are, as your own post demonstrates, as vanishingly rare and unknown as, say, self-proclaimed libertarian bloggers who actually oppose the Bush administration's naked power grab.
As for your questions, if you'll read the comments thread at my place, you'll note that I distinguish between "rock 'n roll" (where obviously the saxophone was prominent from way back) and "rock," which is not quite the same thing, now.
Also, "Aja" is a terrible song. Steely Dan are often very clever but this one falls far short of the mark. And The Bad Plus are fucking awesome, especially their original tunes.
Finally, if you really want to evaluate my credibility or lack thereof, my music's right there for the taking...
Thanks indeed for the link, though. Cheers, all.
I submit for the record: Steve McKay on the Stooges' Funhouse sessions.
This thread is still going on?
DJA: the Motor Totemist Guild album that most prominently involves sax is this one, with contributions from Vinny Golia and and Lynn Johnston.
I forgot to think of the horns on Tom Waits' Rain Dogs, actually from the 80s, too.
Similarly, when I say "rock sax," does Thinking Plague actually pop into your head before anything else? Really?
No, but Etron Fou Leloublan, Henry Cow, and Keith Tippett's Portable Horn Section do.
In fact, I think you'll find that the exception does not, in fact, generally prove the rule.
If we take this at face value, what you would be saying is that the exception disproves the rule—which would seem to be my position. I realize that there's no point in pointing this out, but it's part of the schtick. But persons who sympathize with the dilemma of the rock sax fan shouldn't continually press in our faces the bad old rock sax which (if you're right) is what everyone already thinks of rock saxism, but rather work to effect a positive change by pointing to and praising the good work the sax can perform in rock contexts! Together, victory!
But persons who sympathize with the dilemma of the rock sax fan shouldn't continually press in our faces the bad old rock sax which (if you're right) is what everyone already thinks of rock saxism, but rather work to effect a positive change by pointing to and praising the good work the sax can perform in rock contexts!
Uh, yeah -- cheekiness aside, that was kinda the whole point of my post.