This, I Love

In a mellow tone (Ben Webster)

In a mellow tone
That’s the way to live
If you mope and groan
Something’s gotta give

I was at the coffee shop (why is it always at a coffee shop that I hang out in lately?) with this really cool girl yesterday. She knew I liked this coffee shop. She knew I liked the couch that she intentionally avoided sitting on yesterday. She knew I really like that indecisive moment when I was taking my order because there were just so many drinks to choose from. And as we conversed by the table, I confessed something I’ve kept with me for years already. 

I told her - and this was when a very romantic song was playing - I told her, 

I am madly in love with saxophones. 

I am so in love with it, to the extent that I ask myself, what won’t I give just to turn back to when I was at a younger age and learn playing it? Sure, Kenny G’s been using it pretty horribly and I don’t fancy Dave Koz’s music either, so let’s just classify them under anyone’s list of “people let’s forget exist”. What’s not to like about saxophones? Jazz giants played saxophones! John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Ben Webster, Charlie Parker, Jackie McLean, Stan Getz, Wayne Shorter, the list goes on and on. 

*Nightdreamer closes his eye and plays air saxophone while doing a duck mouth, which makes him look incredibly stupid* 

Sure, I’d also love to rewind time and then learn piano and trumpet too as they’re another two of my favorite instruments, but the saxophone’s lure is unsurpassable. How? Did you notice how it’s built like a tube that slopes downward, and then sveltely goes up again? That has an effect on how it sounds, and it sounds enchanting. Enchanting in many ways like, whenever a note like, say, re, is played, it becomes more like a re-flat transitioning to the natural-re. Like, how when in different volumes it sounds like two differing instruments - soft and it’s like a cat purring, loud and it’s like gospel musicians’ bordering-on-raspy singing. It’s just about the only instrument I can think of that be crooning one minute and then ferocious the next, and in both times be sensual. No wonder it is commonly associated with lovemaking - in a blunt and pithy manner it depicts the different moods taking place when two bare bodies exchange odes with their fluids. Okay, that metaphor was horrible. 

So, did you listen to Ben Webster’s “In a Mellow Tone” that I uploaded and posted above the writings? Beautiful, isn’t it? Which reminds me, I need to do a next post on my All Jazzed Up series. So how about you? Do you have a favorite musical instrument?