Quotes about saxophone

A collection of quotes on the topic of saxophone, play, likeness, love.

Quotes about saxophone

“Don't play the saxophone. Let it play you.”

Charlie Parker (1920–1955) American jazz saxophonist and composer

As quoted in Words of Wisdom (1990) edited by William Safire and Leonard Safir, p. 435

“I love the guitar, always have. I can relate to it a lot better than a saxophone.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

New York Daily News interview (1979)

Love

“Each jazz musician when he takes a horn in his hand — trumpet, bass, saxophone, drums — whatever instrument he plays — each soloist, that is, when he begins to ad lib on a given composition with a title and improvise a new creative melody, this man is taking the place of a composer.”

Charles Mingus (1922–1979) American jazz double bassist, composer and bandleader

What Is A Jazz Composer? (1971)

“When I was young, I never bought records because my brother Joseph played saxophone and had a record player. I loved listening to his records: The Dorsey Brothers, Duke Ellington, all the big American jazz bands, and vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald, Ernestine Anderson, and Kitty White, a singer from the US who was a friend of Nina Simone. Nobody in America seems to know about her, but she was quite popular in South Africa.”

Miriam Makeba (1932–2008) South African singer and civil rights activist

As quoted in Poet, J. (11 February 2009)

Love

“That's wild! I'll start off with five stars and work backwards from there. Now there, to me, is the most perfect band in existence, whether you're thinking of it orchestrationally or in terms of Duke's immensely creative writing. I can't think of anybody I admire more than this man; nobody could even be compared with him, except Billy Strayhorn. Duke does something with this old, tired instrumentation of trumpets, trombones and saxophones, and he has a perfect way of utilizing the men's specific sounds. Anything he plays is a work of art. The band is out of tune, for instance, and it doesn't even matter. They almost have their own brand of intonation. Duke can take an exotic-sounding idea and create something – you might call it sophisticated crudity. It gives both the qualities that I look for – an earthy quality and the sophisticated quality.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Reviewing " Agra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MDDbrAqqg" from Far East Suite, as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#2nmgk677qzm4cnu

Men, Art, Way, Star

“When asked to play a 12-bar blues, Ornette Coleman fingered his plastic saxophone and played nothing…he's felt more nothing than you or I know.”

Ornette Coleman (1930–2015) American jazz musician

Richard_Fariña
About

“Listening to as many guitar solos as possible is the best method for someone in the early stages. But saxophone solos can be helpful. They're interesting because they're all single notes, and therefore can be repeated on the guitar. If you can copy a sax solo you're playing very well, because the average saxophonist can play much better than the average guitarist.”

Ritchie Blackmore (1945) British guitarist and songwriter

Ritchie Blackmore, in: Guitar Player. Vol. 7. (1973). p. 235:
Answer to the question Does listening to solos performed on other instruments than the guitar help the beginning guitarist develop a personal style?

Help

“Midnight, when the monotonous tick-tock of diurnal progress is for one throbbing moment replaced by the cool but smokey honk of a saxophone, alternately seductive and threatening. Midnight. The black growth on the clock face that has to be biopsied every twenty-four hours to see whether it is malignant or benign.”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

“That's five stars to start with. That's five stars to start with. That's Gil Evans, isn't it? The only thing that disturbed me about this—the whole thing, in its entirety, was tremendously satisfying: performance, orchestration is good, the harmonic usage is beautiful, the contrasting texture of orchestra, the whole thing is just great—but there are certain sections there when the background was so lovely it just seemed like the alto saxophone was out of place. Now this is the type of thing that just makes me smile. I enjoy every minute of it. I don't have to go for a "peak" and then think about something else while I'm listening. Gil Evans' writing, to me, is such a boon that when he came along with the Miles Ahead album, I was thankful, because since about the Stan Kenton Orchestra of 1952, where the writing had been very good, between Mulligan and Rugolo and the whole works, between those periods there had been a void, a retrogression back to the roots, and this took writing back to a standpoint which just wasn't interesting. So when Evans came along, I just flipped.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Reviewing Evans' arrangement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao4dcHdoR4k of Dizzy Gillespie's "Manteca,", from New Bottle, Old Wine; as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#rjvay58eo774rhe

Love, Smile, Beauty, Star

“Anyway, you know full well I never wear boutonnieres. The decoration has fallen into disrepute. The only remaining devotees of the practice are roués and saxophone players.”

S. S. Van Dine book The Benson Murder Case

Source: The Benson Murder Case (1926), Ch. 2

“Drum on your drums, batter on your banjos,
sob on the long cool winding saxophones.
Go to it, O jazzmen.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

"Jazz Fantasia" (1920)

“On working at La Passione (1996): Day one, the damage was done. All it was meant to be was one hour of a little boy’s dreams. And I had things I wanted to do with the guitar that hadn’t been done before. Like, there’s one number called "Olive Oil", where I was actually playing slide guitar in the same scale as a saxophone. […] But then in came millions of executives from America. So in the end, it fell flat on its arse. And it came out the same week that Britpop took off. Blair had just won the election. Oasis. Spice Girls. So something a bit Fellini-ish – about a little boy who loved red cars – went straight over the top. It was like, ‘Well, don’t you have a 335 guitar with a Union Jack on it?’”

Chris Rea (1951) English singer-songwriter

2015

Love, Dreams, Cars, Girl

“His musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering a saxophone. Such practical 'limitations' did not even have to be overcome in his music; they somehow never existed for him. Despite this--or more accurately, because of this--his playing has a deep inner logic. Not an obvious surface logic, it is based on subtleties of reaction, subtleties of timing and color that are, I think, quite new to jazz--at least they have never appeared in so pure and direct a form.”

Ornette Coleman (1930–2015) American jazz musician

Gunther Schuller, quoted in [All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century, 1983, Rockwell, John, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 0394511638].
About

World, Music, Color, Way

“Bill Clinton is like a lot of white politicians. They eat soul food, they party with black women, they play the saxophone, but when it comes to domestic and foreign policy, they make the same decisions that are destructive to African people in this country and throughout the world.”

Sister Souljah (1964) American hip hop-generation author, activist, recording artist, and film producer

The Today show (16 June 1992)

Women, People, World, Food

“Tristano was too contrived for me; he sounded terribly planned. Lee is very intuitive. One of my proudest achievements was when I finally got to play the saxophone well enough that I could improvise on it. I aimed to have a tone like Lee Konitz—but I don't necessarily think I got there!”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

As quoted in Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser's Art https://books.google.com/books?id=pc4CsgVHLw0C&pg=PA65&dq=%22Tristano+was+too+contrived+for+me%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAGoVChMIrKPnnf_OxwIVBDU-Ch0dxg5F#v=onepage&q=%22Tristano%20was%20too%20contrived%20for%20me%22&f=falseLee

Thinking

“Along with the steady diet sitar, sarod, and tabla, several new instruments and players came to my attention. The first of these was Ustad Bismillah Khan, master of the sonorous double-reed instrument known as shehnai. This beautiful wind instrument, with finger holes and a bell-shaped opening at the bottom, sounded to me like a hybrid of soprano saxophone and oboe, and Bismillah Khan’s tone very much influenced what Coltrane and Terry Riley would do with the soprano sax. Primarily used at weddings, the shehnai had been rejected as a classical instrument until Bismillah Khan elevated it to a higher status among listeners. His unique fingertips and sublime breath control produced the necessary range of sounds for raga making shehnai one of the more popular instruments in North India.”

Bismillah Khan (1916–2006) Indian musician

Peter Lavezzoli in his bo [Lavezzoli, Peter, The Dawn of Indian Music in the West, http://books.google.com/books?id=OSZKCXtx-wEC&pg=PA375, 24 April 2006, Continuum, 978-0-8264-1815-9, 32]

Beauty, Making love, Wedding

“There's something very special indeed,
In all the places where I've seen you shine, boy.
There's something very real in how I feel, honey.
It's in me.
It's in me,
And you know it's for real.
Tuning in on your saxophone...”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Source: Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)

Boy, Feeling