The Saxophone Survives

If there was ever a period in American popular music friendly to wind players it would have been the Swing era (mid-1930’s until World War II). The average swing band employed up to 15 wind players: saxophones, trombones and trumpets. If you think about the fact that swing was the popular music of the day, the chance of being employed as a saxophonist, trumpeter or trombonist was far greater than in any other period before or after.

Things changed fairly quickly when Swing fell out of favor. Pop music turned its focus on the vocalist: Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Doris Day, and so on. These singers were backed by mostly nameless studio orchestras. Following that, the advent of Rock & Roll further focused the spotlight on the singer/front man and brought the electric guitar to the forefront, an amplified instrument that could rival the volume previously created by the 15 saxes and brass players. Wind players were mostly left to scramble and head to the studios or the school band rooms in the hopes of staying in the business.

For adaptable players, the one wind instrument that survived was the saxophone. The sax became the instrument that best suited the new sounds: Rhythm & Blues and Rock & Roll. For some reason the saxophone was most appropriate for this new raunchy and raw music, perhaps because it is capable of producing a very human sound with growls, flutters, doits, shrieks and the like. Some of the saxophone players who were able to embrace this new sound found themselves quite busy. People like King Curtis and Sam “The Man” Taylor were called upon to come into the studio and create 20 seconds of magic on countless pop recordings. Their sounds are familiar even if their names are not.

We can point to singer/saxophonist Louis Jordan as one of the musicians who managed the transition in fine style and set the table for those to come. Louis created a small jump band using a saxophone and a trumpet that bridged the gap between the large swing bands and Rock & Roll. In addition, the instrumental music of the 50’s and 60’s that managed to find a space on the airwaves was heavily saxophone oriented. Bassist Bill Black, of Elvis Presley sideman fame, went on to form the Bill Black Combo, a group that released numerous albums of instrumental covers with the a nameless saxophonist taking the place of the vocal. Ace Cannon, another saxophone player, found a similar niche playing pop instrumentals that made Rock & Roll palatable to almost every age group. These saxophonists rarely received credit on the recordings, and sometimes received disdain from the strict jazzers, but we can assume they welcomed the work.

Alto players Louis and Ace notwithstanding, the predominant saxophone voice of the day was the tenor. It seemed to best fit the range and match the male vocal, and new entries to the scene included Plas Johnson, Jerome Richardson and Harold Ashby. This is the same Harold Ashby who was in the Duke Ellington saxophone section for a decade, after he was a preeminent sax voice on the electric blues coming out of Chicago on Chess Records.

This trend continued into the 70’s and 80’s. Among the instrumentalists who were able to bridge the world of jazz and rock are the prominent saxophonists Grover Washington, David Sanborn and Kenny Gee, who is now reportedly the largest selling instrumentalist of all time. He surpassed trumpeter Herb Alpert, one of the few exceptions to the saxophone rule. While solos from wind instruments seem to be increasingly rare in pop music, if you hear one in the form of the music of Sting, Phil Collins, or Billy Joel, it will most likely be the saxophone.

 Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone, focused on developing a hybrid between brass and woodwinds, and he would be pleased that his instrument thrived. Perhaps it’s a little payback for the lack of saxophones in symphonic orchestras. The saxophone’s popularity may explain why typical middle and high school band directors now share a common observation with Professor Harold Hill: “I have saxophones ‘springing up like weeds.’”

 

The Curious Power of Eighth Notes

Do eighth notes gets eight beats? Do eighth notes get an eighth of a beat? Those of you who are reading this who know better are aware that an eighth note almost always gets a half a beat. It’s simply based on four. Eight eighth notes equal four whole beats, thus one eighth note is a half a beat.

In music, two eighth notes on the page indicate an even dividing of the beat: the downbeat and the upbeat. Musicians count them in different ways. Most music teachers say one-and, two-and. Some music teachers say tee-tee-ta (two eighth notes and a quarter note). Eighth notes figure prominently in some memorable musical phrases. Think of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: three eighth notes followed by a half note. Think of the chromatic foreboding introduction to the theme from “Jaws,” a series of eighth notes. You will have to decide which of those two is more important in music history.

A curious thing happened along the way to paired eighth notes. Generally speaking, until the beginning of the twentieth century, eighth notes were played as a down and an up evenly. The beat was divided in half, each half getting the same amount of time. When blues, and especially jazz, started to germinate in the southern U.S. around the turn of the century, eighth notes began to be played in more of a skipping fashion, the first half getting slightly more than the second half. We cannot point to one person who started this trend, although Louis Armstrong is credited with teaching the world how to swing more than anyone else. Indeed, the most obvious characteristic of what we now call swing music was the pairs of eighth notes played with the first half longer than the second half. The best example I can think of is Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” If you look at it on paper, it’s simply a series of eighth notes. But the swing musicians learned that eighth notes were not played evenly. Each pair was played with the first half somewhat longer than the second half. When the arrangers and composers tried to write it down they found it was an inexact science. It’s not a dotted eighth plus sixteenth note, that’s too march-like. It’s more like the beat divided in three parts with the first two connected by a tie. It’s too technical to verbally describe, but we can hear it immediately. Swing music is based on “swinging” eighth notes. The eighth notes in classical music resisted the impulse to swing, thus widening the divide.

That’s not the end of the story, however. Curiously enough, after some fifty years of swinging eighth notes in popular music, they started to migrate back to where they started. I think we can point to the beginning of Rock & Roll: Chuck Berry and Little Richard for example as the transition. These musicians had half a foot coming out of the swing and rhythm & blues era, where eighth notes were unevenly divided and swinging. We can hear the transition in the music of Louis Jordan. Fairly quickly (think Jerry Lee Lewis) the eighth notes became straight again, played much like classical eighth notes and exactly like written on the page. This straightening out of the eighth notes became the biggest distinguishing feature between swing and what was subsequently called Rock & Roll. When a musician calls a tune and a drummer is not familiar with it, their first question would probably be “do you want me to swing it or play straight?” In other words, is it swinging uneven eighth notes or straight eighth notes.

I love the offhand comment that saxophonist Jerry Dodgion made about this in 1996. Jerry is a man who grew up in the swing era and makes his living as a jazz and swing musician. He was around to observe the transition and the profound effect it had on the music business and his own work.

JD: In those days the pop music was still jazz oriented more so. Then later on it became more Rock & Roll, even eighth note oriented. So it changes, it’s changing all the time.

MR: Can I just back up? You just said “even note oriented.”

JD: Even eighth note.

MR: Yes. See I never heard anybody quite describe ... we know how swing eighth notes go and how Rock & Roll eighth notes go, but no one ever exactly said the music became even note oriented. That’s very interesting to me.

JD: Well some drummers, if you talk to some drummers, they might tell you that. Because that’s a basic thing. It’s an even eighth note as opposed to the twelve eight, smooth flowing.

One eighth note by itself doesn’t make any difference. But two makes all the difference in the world. You can hear the transition happening in the recording studio with some of Chuck Berry’s early music where Chuck is wailing away on straight eighth notes and half his band is obviously swinging. The juxtaposition of the two says volumes more than any music history book can describe.