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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2343 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 17, 2025

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The other day I was thinking why 80s music was so much better than modern music and then it hit me: It's the saxophone solos!

What are some of your favorite songs with epic sax solos?

I'll start with Girl Meets Boy - Waiting For A Star To Fall (solo at 3:07) and Gerry Rafferty - Baker Street (solo first at 0:24 and then repeats at other times).

Edit: No need to limit suggestions to the 80s. Epic sax is epic sax!

Blue Giant - First Note.

"Midnight City", M83.

Hot take but sax is bad. Trumpets and trombones are just better.

Ah, you're referring to the Bad Saxophone Solo (BSS). I stayed up much later than I should trying to find this incredibly on-point article posted to a now defunct file sharing site back in 2002. I'm posting it here not only for the enjoyment of everyone on the site, but so I can find it without searching the depths of the Internet Archive and its dead links. It goes to show how much hip musical tastes have changed in the past 25 years, and is a bit of a time capsule (it would be unthinkable now for a serious critic or music fan to shit on Hall & Oates, but back then they were punching bags). Enjoy:

Amongst the many horrible things to emerge from the cultural swamp of the 1980s (Reaganomics, crack, leg-warmers, the Coreys Haim and Feldman, Winger), there is nothing in the world of Rock music worse than the Bad Saxophone Solo. Unremittingly phony and invariably devoid of any shred of real emotion or creative expression, this sonic assault on all that is worthwhile is more destructive and more widespread than one could imagine in their most horrific nightmare.

Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of the Bad Saxophone Solo (BSS) is its origins. By all accounts, no matter when it was first laid to wax, all BSS seem directly evolved from Kenny G.'s 1986 smooth-jazz hit "Songbird." So awful that it seems to exist outside of time, this incomprehensible morass of suck is ground zero for all Bad Saxophone Solos ever. Spreading the BSS from Smooth Jazz throughout the world of popular music, "Songbird"'s evil is so pervasive that not even the collective din of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Roland Kirk, Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson, and Lester Young all simultaneously spinning in their graves non-stop since its inception can drown out its malignant influence.

The BSS' powers are truly formidable: after but a few seconds of its aural assault, a cheesy-but-catchy pretentious prog-pop tune like Supertramp's "The Logical Song" is rendered so muzacky and faux-funky as to make the theme from Night Court seem like a vintage George Clinton production. The Bad Saxophone Solo has even been known to crop up within the confines of otherwise decent songs. In the middle of a relatively quality tune like the Pogues' "Summer in Siam," the schlocky BSS is like a fire hydrant at a dog-show - a piss-soaked novelty distracting all attention away from the true talent and refinement therein.

But, let's back up. What exactly is the BSS? The Bad Saxophone solo is an insidious but elusive blight. On the wings of some Joe Cool sunglasses-wearing, bandana-ed jackass's overly emotive stage gesticulations it alternately glides or skronks and wails it's way into your brain. Before long you're staring vacuously into space, tuning out not just it but the entire world around you, because the truly Bad Saxophone Solo is literally mind-numbing. Which song contained its gut-wrenching sound? And how exactly did its pseudo-bluesy/soulful melodic interpolation go? You don't know, because, like elevator music (even the worst of which is a preferable alternative), a Bad Saxophone Solo convinces the brain on an essentially primal level that sensory stimulus is a bad thing. In order to avoid the BSS (along with some of its multi-media counterparts like the Bad Hotel Painting and the Local Car Dealership Commercial) the brain attempts to ignore it and in the process closes itself off to the world around it.

Alas, the world, and unfortunately the BSS, is still there, and upon recovery blame must be placed in order for any true healing to begin. Some culprits are obvious. The music of Glenn Frey is a good place to start. Often, as one begins to surface out of the depths of a Bad Saxophone Solo-induced stupor, vague memories of the drab tones of this former Eagle's laughably idiotic music will linger. Was it "The Heat Is On" that so dulled your senses, or could it have been the pummel-your-forehead-repeatedly-against-a-spackled-concrete-wall tones of that soft-rock atrocity "You Belong To the City?" You don't know, and that's the point. Like an aural lobotomy, the very nature of the Bad Saxophone Solo prevents its victim from remembering its exact source. What's more, prior knowledge of the stopped-up commode that is Frey's musical canon may not be enough to help the victim sort out what just happened. Even an experienced BSS victim is subject to the confusion and chaos that follows a severe attack, often mistaking the music of Frey for other sources (such as serial-BSS conveyors like Huey Lewis and the News or Hall and Oates).

The experience can be excruciating. A typical Bad Saxophone Solo experience finds the victim awakening - like a sorority-girl the morning after a Rohypnol-enhanced date-rape - groggy and disoriented but acutely aware that they've been fucked and that it was a far from pleasurable experience. Drooling uncontrollably and just steps away from catatonia, the unlucky listener will, for example, catch the last few endlessly repeated chords of the George Thorogood blues-rock abortion that is "Bad to the Bone." Many victims are unable to believe that this song could actually get any worse, but indeed, its atrociously soulless and completely forgettable Bad Saxophone Solo makes it so.

The question remains: why would the Bad Saxophone Solo do this? What is it goal? The answer may be revealed deep within the lyrics of one particularly saccharine and nauseous BSS carrier. To the casual observer, Wham!'s "Careless Whisper" might be dismissed as the lonely musings of two men, one struggling with the desire to thwart anonymity and the other struggling to stop getting caught having anonymous homosexual sex in public bathrooms. But "Careless Whisper" is so much more than that. It is actually both a purveyor of the BSS and an unintentional post-modern treatise on the plight of the Bad Saxophone Solo victim. The "whisper" at issue here is not just, as would at first seem the case, the hushed words of a gossiping lover. The "whisper" is in fact the bleating, faux-soothing tones of a particularly bland Bad Saxophone Solo. "No, I'm never gonna dance again…" reveals "Careless Whisper"'s narrator, unveiling the ultimate harrowing result of the BSS. The BSS to prevent (often with great success) its victim from any further enjoyment of music. Ever. Especially music that contains saxophones. The ugly truth is that, for the BSS victim, "guilty feet have got no rhythm."

There is no known cure for the Bad Saxophone Solo, and no band or musical style is safe from its cancerous grasp. Great bands like Pink Floyd, David Bowie, and, yes, even the Rolling Stones have bowed to its hokey will. It is inescapable. Even if one were to explicitly avoid elevators, dentist chairs and movie soundtracks, the BSS would still creep up unannounced on Classic Rock radio - perhaps even in an overblown "life on the road" Bob Seger ballad. Worse yet, though the frequency of the BSS has diminished since the onset of the 90s (3d Wave Ska Revival non-withstanding), it is quickly being replaced by an even more deadly variant: the dreaded Rock and Roll Scratch-DJ Turntable Solo (RRSDJTS). For the love of God, please, beware.

-Robert Whiteman

It’s funny, but it starts from the premise that the “BSS” is “B” without really describing why.

You just had to be there. There's nothing bad about sax solos per se, but by 1992 they had gone out of style and were a reminder of the 80s, which wasn't held in high esteem. Sax solos in pop records were ersatz soul. In R&B records they had worn out their welcome. But mostly it was just an ick factor involving anything associated with the 80s. The article isn't meant to be taken too seriously.

Would it be fair to call them the "rap interludes" of their time?

Man, we have definitely gone too far in the other direction, but Gen-Xers are truly an insufferable generation.

The Night Court theme is asked the question of "how can you possibly give an appropriate introduction to such an awesome show", and yet manages to answer with a confident "don't worry, I got this".

This is a very recent one, but Louis Cole - Life. He's one of my favourite modern jazz fusion artists, and the sax solo towards the second half of the song is absolutely tremendous. The underlying chord progression moves very quickly and isn't a particularly easy pattern to improvise over, yet the sax player almost seems to glide around all these constant key changes. Another great, albeit discordant, version of this from the same album is Bitches.

Oh, also, here's one actually from the 80s - JAGATARA's album The Naked King has some killer sax solos on it. Some good examples from there are the songs Hadaka No Osama (the sax solo in this one goes on forever, just wait for it) and Misaki De Matsuwa.

Also much of what Colin Stetson makes is achieved only with saxophone, so it's technically 100% sax solo, though his output is quite ritualistic, soundtracky and meditative and almost certainly not what you're looking for. It is beautiful music though; it's almost religious in quality.

"Money," by Pink Floyd has an epic tenor sax solo by a session pro in the song's primary 7/4 meter, preceding the more epic guitar solo in the easier to play 12/8. "Doctor Wu," by Steely Dan famously featured jazz-great alto saxophonist Phil Woods. (Also, jazz-great Wayne Shorter on "Aja," but that song's a bit pretentious.) And any Joni Mitchell song with Wayne Shorter.

Lily Was Here was literally 50% sax.

I think this proves sax is only appropriate in moderation.

At the risk of being satirical, can I nominate this?

You also can’t go wrong with Take Five or the Pink Panther theme song. Of course, none of these are from the ’80s.

At the risk of being satirical, can I nominate this?

I'm slightly disappointed you didn't link to the 10 hours version.

Careless Whisper

On the topic of music, does anyone know of any good blogs/videos aimed at laymen that explains why current pop music sounds the way it does?

Another Day by Dream Theater

Gunship is one of the bands bringing this back (that a music ignorant normie like me knows about). Tim Cappello's solo in Dark All Day was great.

Also recommend The Midnight, in the same vein.

Obviously the big ones that immediately come to mind are “Rio” by Duran Duran, “Who Can It Be Now” by Men At Work, “What You Need” by INXS (they’ve got a number of great saxophone parts, played by the great Kirk Pengilly) and “Born To Run” by Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band (another band with a great full-time saxophonist, Clarence Clemons, who also has a great saxophone solo on his duet with Jackson Browne, “You’re A Friend Of Mine”).

EDIT: I read your post as specifically asking for 80’s songs with saxophone solos. A modern pop song with a great sax solo would be “Ancient History” by Marianas Trench. (Although TBH I think this is actually a synth mimicking a saxophone.)

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