Word: sax
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Wordless. Unlike the many jazz singers who grimace, snap their ringers or just plain wonder what to do with themselves during long instrumental introductions and interludes, Cleo knows precisely what is called for: she sings along with all the wordless instrumental agility of a clarinet cozying up to a sax. The man who plays sax to Cleo's clarinet is her arranger, conductor and husband, Johnny Dankworth, himself a leading British jazzman and composer...
...early 19th century Belgium, Adolphe Sax was struck on the head by a brick. The accident-prone lad also swallowed a needle, fell down a flight of stairs, toppled onto a burning stove, and accidentally drank some sulfuric acid. When he grew up, he invented the saxophone...
...continuing disdain in which 20th century composers hold the sax is also due in part to its ascendancy in the 1920s as a leading voice of dance and jazz bands. (Critic Leonard Feather once wrote that the coat of arms for F. Scott Fitzgerald could have been two alto saxophones rampant on a field of cocktail shakers.) Even so, the sax had to overcome the prejudice of old-line jazz purists. Trumpeter Bunk Johnson once complained that it did not fit into the traditional New Orleans ensemble of trumpet, trombone and clarinet. "It just runs up and downstairs with...
...saxophonists have begun organizing to do something about their collective inferiority complex. In Toronto, 400 players from North America, Europe and the Far East gathered recently for the third World Saxophone Congress. The aim of the congress was to win a chair for the sax in the orchestra and to encourage composers to write more and better solo music for the instrument...
Some of the new works featured saxophone solos played against taped backgrounds of spoken dialogue, birdcalls or bursts of electronic light and shadow. The Robert Sibbing Quintet of Macomb, Ill., even turned up with a complete Mozart string quintet transcribed for the sax. French Virtuoso Jean-Marie Londeix wailed into some high, American-style leaps during the premiere of Fellow Countryman Guy Lacour's Hommage à Jacques Ibert, thereby precipitating excited talk of a possible fusion between the French school of playing (bright, full tone, strict adherence to the instrument's normal 2½-octave range...