In a way, I started out to be a baritone player.
I feel very honored to be playing with Bill Pierce. He's such a great musician.
As a very small girl, I listened to Charlie Parker and loved him and Max Roach and people like that.
So I played alto for quite a while until I saved up the money for the baritone.
Saxophone is one thing, and music is another.
I made the tenor sax - there's nobody plays like me and I don't play like anybody else.
The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it's still a melody.
Ab-Souls Outro' serves as a jazzy, spoken summation of 'Section.80's themes. Guest cohort Ab-Soul opens the song with one urgent verse after another: Flowing freely like the saxophone behind him, his words advocate veering outside life's most predictable pathways.
Now, I only play very occasionally, and in fact, more piano than clarinet or sax.
I wanted to be Gerry Mulligan, only, see, I didn't have any kind of technique. So I thought, well, baritone sax is kind of easier; I can manage that - except I couldn't afford a baritone, so I bought an alto, which was the same fingering.
The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.
When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.
I grew up listening to John Coltrane and jazz, so they were subtle influences. I sometimes think about doing some kind of weird jazz record, but I don't know... It's on my list of things to do. I don't want to have to then go promote it.
Grover Washington was my main influence, and when I went to college, I started listening to more of the jazz masters like Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane.
The saxophone is the embodied spirit of beer.
Rock and Roll: Music for the neck downwards.
Some songs are just going to be acoustic with just maybe some light background stuff going on and maybe violin or something like that. Or sax - I mean, I'm definitely having some sax. That's just what I love. It's going to be jazz-rock stuff. That's what I'm aiming for.
I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the '70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young - all of these incredible musicians.
If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it's like the human voice.
Jazz was my first love.
My father was a jazz tenor sax player. He played in a lot of big bands. So I had that sound around me all the time. The first record that really caught my ear was Clifford Brown's 'Brownie Eyes.' I grew up listening to John Coltrane and Illinois Jacquet. This is where I come from... I love improvisational music.
Swing is my favorite kind of music.
You know, John Coltrane has been sort of a god to me. Seems like, in a way, he didn't get the inspiration out of other musicians. He had it. When you hear a cat do a thing like that, you got to go along with him. I think I heard Coltrane before I really got close to Miles [Davis]. Miles had a tricky way of playing his horn that I didn't understand as much as I did Coltrane. I really didn't understand what Coltrane was doing, but it was so exciting the thing that he was doing.
Hey, look at this guy Kenny G. with his thing, walking up and down the aisles of the concert hall and running off the stage and playing the same time. It's old hat!
I still prefer the bebop of the '40s. The very stuff I started out with is still the best to me. I have come full circle.
