This is Adam Manus.

And I'm Peter Martin.

And you're listening to the You'll Hear a podcast.

Daily jazz advice coming at you.

Today we're going to put a spotlight on the saxophone.

Oh, God.

Why?

It could be dangerous.

It's a metal instrument.

We're going to put a spotlight on it.

We don't want it to get too close, I guess.

You're going to blind the audience, man.

So the saxophone, this is a lot of fun because I think that there's no other instrument that's more iconic and more connected, specifically to jazz than the saxophone. I know when it was created by,

I believe, Adolf Sax, who was a Belgian gentleman. I am not looking at Wikipedia right now.

That's convenient. Yeah. I know it was created before jazz existed, I guess. It's true.

But it's really the most closely aligned with jazz in terms of saxophone. There's some beautiful classical music, but it's a little bit limited to a certain French repertoire, I would say. And, I mean, if you think about every corny jazz poster you've ever seen, it's usually like a cat with a saxophone or something like that. Yeah, we should put that as the the image for this podcast, man. That's right. Yeah, I think Adolf Sax developed it because brass instruments were getting so good and so loud that he, I think, the story goes, he wanted something that would cut, you know, through in the bands. So we have the saxophone and they cut through our bands.

Let's put a little spotlight on it.

And I think with these, what's fun is if we just sort of talk about, you know, specific

artists, maybe some recordings and sort of stylistic things.

So why don't you kick it off with one of your favorite?

Yeah, one of my favorite musicians of all time is the great Lester Young.

He really defined what the tenor saxophone could be in a modern jazz sense.

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