Soprano Sax Quotes

Somewhere along the line Coltrane's soprano sax runs out of steam. Now it's McCoy Tyner's piano solo I hear, the left hand carving out a repetitious rhythm and the right layering on thick, forbidding chords. Like some mythic scene, the music portrays somebody's - a nameless, faceless somebody's - dim past, all the details laid out as clearly as entrails being dragged out of the darkness. Or at least that's how it sounds to me. The patient, repeating music ever so slowly breaks apart the real, rearranging the pieces. It has a hypnotic, menacing smell, just like the forest.

I try whistling to fill in the silence. The soprano sax from Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” though of course my dubious whistling doesn’t come anywhere near the complex, lightning-quick original. I just add bits so what I hear in my head approximates the sound. Better than nothing, I figure.

I went to the CD player, choosing some soft and soothing soprano sax, courtesy of the late Art Porter.

Music is an amazing medicine... you can feel like life is all total bullshit and that nothing really matters and life is a big ball of absurdity and meaninglessness and then you hear a recording of Louis Armstrong playing When the Saints, and all of a sudden you feel that tiny spark of joy that makes life all the more bearable. How on earth do deaf people find joy without music? While silence may be golden, the vibrato from a soprano sax is priceless.