Their behaviour is acoustically mysterious … we get fundamentals being pitched a third or a fourth deeper, as if the air column were projected back, in imagination, to the true apex of the cone-bore, which is in most cases several inches beyond the reed (down the player’s throat, as it were).
– Anthony Baines, Woodwind Instruments and Their History
Lying in its case, the alto sax looks brash, nouveau riche, a gold tooth. Pick it up, heft it, plonk the keys down with a sound like whumping the top of a beer bottle. You could play this thing, man, it’s just a kazoo with buttons. Follow the action as you press this key or that, watching the force reverse over a see-saw hinge or torque around the cylinder to pop a hole open or closed: mechanism: it’s a fantastic insect, the elegance of niftiness rather than refinement. So blow. The sax isn’t going to transform your breath like other instruments but magnify it, reaching back down your throat to amplify its possibilities, giving prominence to neglected dialects like the honk, the cough, the hum, and even (Archie Shepp) the last gasp. It does not concern itself with angels, as the flute, nor with the dead like Dante, modernism, and the cello. It does not even imitate or extend the human voice as the violin is said to do. The sax is equipment singing – our equipment: a troubling of air which addresses us, the dying, from our own respiratory systems. Its idiom is breath, unrelieved of the deplorable burdens of sex and work. It has the richness of a muffler in its last days, an overloaded ferry on a muddy river. You may hear your father’s phlegmy old Chev or the soft honk of Trumpeter Swans over miles of high prairie. You may hear soupe du zoo. You will always hear the sob in the note, the hollow sob which comes from the lung, the womb of voice. The sob that will gather the unsay-able without cashing it in on lyric silver. When the wind blows (Lao-tzu) there is only wind. When the sax blows there is only wind and the whole goddamned human condition. Mortality’s exhaust pipe. Ready for nothing.