05.23.23: Notes on the Saxophone

a high-stakes poll of my subscribers!

This is a photo of someone else’s saxophone. I’m not about to share my mom’s framed photo of me holding mine in high school. I would rather die!

There were, at one point, five Justins, including me, in my high school marching band. Three of them, including me, played sax, though one of the three (not me) alternated between bari sax and tenor quads. I mostly played alto but also played bari on occaission in marching band and stage band; E♭, represent. Our band director was a extremely petite young woman named Amy, she was smaller than every kid in the band, and yet, shockingly, she played bari, a saxophone about as big as her, in fact she let me borrow hers through senior year. I took some weird pride in marching the bari without a neckstrap, with all my upper body strength. But of course my ideal sidepiece was the alto, a saxophone about the size of a katana or a submachine gun. I flatly refused to pick up a tenor, as those things always looked so wet and hulking and unwieldy to me, also I didn’t really get transposition and was rather naively intimidated by the difference in pitch. Everyone else had Selmers; I had a Yamaha. Those Selmers looked old and blighted; my Yamaha was pound cake yellow with lots of smudges but no major scratches. Once Jasmine and Elroy graduated, Crystal and I, neighborhood frenemies since elementary school, were rivals for first chair in symphonic band. I think Crystal had some other brand of saxophone, actually. She took good care of hers, too. I clung to my alto like nothing else in my childhood. But then in college I sold my alto, bought a soprano, and started to get the hang of yet another saxophone until, unfortunately, at some indeterminate point, I either lost the soprano in the big move when my mom downsized from my childhood home to a townhouse in Virginia or else the soprano was stolen from a practice room at Georgetown — I could never conclusively determine its fate. In any case, that’s when I stopped playing the saxophone.

I say all of this to now say: I’ve spent the past couple years, ever since I left New York, now that I have the practice space, wondering whether I should pick up a saxophone once again. Maybe I use this thing to perform cringe covers of video game music in my home office. Maybe I join a community band in Cleveland. I’m open to any number of potential uses.

My main hang-up isn’t even the choice to get back into playing per se but rather the analyis paralysis on the matter of alto vs. tenor. The alto is cheaper and more familiar and probably a bit more versatile. The tenor is allegedly sexier and better for playing the devil’s music, and picking it up would round out my experience with the core sax family. I’ve polled friends, and the consensus — minus all the respondants telling me that I should simply follow my heart — is slightly in favor of the tenor. But what do you all think? I have to believe that at least a few of you reading this newsletter have some overheated opinions about woodwinds. Please share them below or via Notes, email, text, etc. Sooner or later, I must choose!