a year in four saxophones
A saxophone is a city. Or a small synecdoche, another valve in that artificial heart. Its sound surmounts the City while also gathering up its ambience, screeching with the subway through tunnels and coiling with chitchat through crowds. Perhaps because the instrument is less than 200 years old, it sounds more contemporary than other woodwinds. It hits our ears already modern, already urban.
In the spring of 2020, the city went suddenly silent. Roy Nathanson, a musician, poet, and teacher, found himself confined to his house in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, his upcoming tours cancelled. So he walked out onto his porch at five o’clock and played “Amazing Grace.” The next day, he played again, again at five o’clock. And the next and the next. Soon, friends and strangers were bringing their saxophones and basses and melodicas and drumkits to play along from beneath the porch. At 5pm, one song, for 82 days straight.
This year, three years after the final porch concert, Nathanson released an LP called 82 Days. Though it includes songs played from the porch and even samples the performances, the studio album evokes a wider ambivalence: that awkward necessity of both celebrating with strangers and mourning them. The album opens with a spectral choral sample of “Go Down, Moses,” out of which Nathanson’s saxophone winds like a snake. The bass on the second track thunks like a generator, as Nathanson and Nick Hakim repeat its grave refrain: “All The Bones Had Names.”
The YouTube videos of these 5pm porch concerts, with neighbors and passersby arranged like mannequins on Nathanson’s lawn, are artifacts of the pandemic, evidence of that resilience that felt more like clinging than courage. Unlike the videos, 82 Days is no mere artifact but has emerged, years later, with something to say, not just something to commemorate. With its grab-bag of covers staggering from sorrowful to sanguine, 82 Days sounds less like the pandemic than someone telling a story about it, following life like a melody through the City’s noise, the saxophone dragging along the ghosts and the names, the applause and the clatter, the long banal crescendo out of silence.
A City makes history not just by being reinvented but by being reinhabited, and Nathanson plays classics and covers—Thelonius Monk’s “Green Chimneys,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Amazing Grace”—with the tenor of the pandemic times, that harried optimism weighted with an indistinct sorrow. It’s there on all the tracks, from the ominous to the playful. On a boisterous and unlikely rendition of “Tennessee Waltz,” Hakim’s vocals compete with the ambience of what sounds like a restaurant. Someone says “a year before the pandemic,” a glass shatters, and the clanging continues while Hakim sings. “Smile” opens with a recording of Nathanson saying “We’ll be back in ten minutes with—,” which breaks off and repeats, joining the jubilant percussion. There’s nothing in the City that can’t be incorporated and accumulated, no sound that can’t be recirculated as rhythm.
In an interview about the porch concerts, Nathanson describes that Covid spring: “It was creepy. It was really creepy. And it really had the resonance of something different.” Three years on, “the resonance of something different” is still resounding. What is it of? A saxophone on a front porch, echoing through the years. The pandemic was respiratory: it stole breath. Nathanson, three years on, is still breathing new life into old songs, new old breath into the same old instrument. An accretion of songs and sounds that might approximate a city, even if just one small piece of it, from one small but endless-seeming point in time.
2.
A saxophone is the sea. Purling and spluttering, swelling and surging, calm but never at rest. In Colin Stetson’s hands, the saxophone becomes all manner of maritime metaphors and nautical instruments: a siren, a depth charge, a whalesong, a gale whistling through a shipwreck.
Stetson’s When we were that what wept for the sea, released this May, begins with an inhalation through the saxophone, as if it were a breathing apparatus. The saxophone drones, long and low like a ship’s horn. Soon a melody takes shape, a foghorn from shore, speaking back to the ship. For over an hour, the record breaks against itself, whirling around the central image of a lighthouse, which appears five times, its grand musical motif like the glimpse of blue sky in a storm.
82 Days was forged in public mourning and the celebration of survival. When we were that is a private mourning, an ode to one who died. Stetson wrote and recorded the album after the death of his father, and has declined to speak at length about the record. Keeping close the grief, or keeping words away from the truer thing: this sonic seascape summoned by his hands and breath, roiling with anguish and longing. The ominous wavebeat of “Infliction,” the bobbling buoy of “Passage,” the growling typhoon of “Behind the sky.” The saxophone, like a sudden death, gathers vastness around its object before sucking it far out to sea.
Like any unplanned eulogy, it has an opaque and rambling quality, its meaning requiring information that it refuses to provide. Iarla Ó Lionáird sings in Gaelic on “The Lighthouse III” and reads a poem on “The Lighthouse V.” There’s mention of a lighthouse, of course, but also desert flowers and someone working a garden. Days that shine “like fireflies.” The language seems willfully vague, its importance not understood so much as trusted to be true, the way one listens to someone describing a dream or to an eulogist directly addressing the grave. The opacity of the language and the shorter timeline of its creation lends the album a desperate, honest quality, as if Stetson needed to capture one shape of the sea before it disappeared back into its deep.
The record ends with “Safe with me,” Stetson singing wordlessly through the saxophone, his instrument that can conjure tempests gone soft and warbled, claimed by the very waves it called forth. It is an aching thing: a lament that, like all laments, is just a lullaby heard one last time, sung back from the bottom of the sea.
3.
A saxophone is a spell. Nathanson and Stetson play the saxophone with their lungs, their mouths, their fingers. Cole Pulice adds feet: they use pedals to manipulate signal processing equipment in real time, expanding the saxophone into something celestial, traversing the membrane between analog and digital. Improvising a performance at the Drone Not Drones festival this past January, Pulice realized that they “could already sense the totality of the final piece hidden somewhere within what I had just played.” This improvisation would become “If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture,” a 22-minute record released in June by Longform Editions.
The first half of the record has no recognizable saxophone, even though that’s all it is: the bright, reverberating soundscape is the live processing of sound into data and back into sound. When the more familiar notes of the saxophone arrive, halfway through the piece, they sound heroic, unmistakeable. This interplay of the alien and the known, all emanating from one person and one instrument, sounds astoundingly modern, a shapeshifting zone of comfort and bafflement, befitting our electroacoustic world. Pulice’s saxophone is a machine that both opens a portal and passes through it, Pulice like a firewalker lighting the coals and dancing across.
“If I Don’t See You” consists of only two takes and minor tweaking, true to its improvisational origins. But the record was born not just in improvising but in listening, an attunement to what was already there. According to Pulice, “Deep and deliberate practices of listening can be both incredibly personal and communal experiences that are portals into alternate planes. […] listening rituals are forms of magic. I used to feel this figuratively, but increasingly I find myself thinking this more literally, as in: literally a form of spellcasting.”
If that sounds far out, so does “If I Don’t See You.” If it is not magic, it is at least a transformation, the saxophone processed into something unfamiliar before reappearing as something known. Pulice has mentioned that the record was “influenced by the ephemerality of time with those I hold dearly, processing love and the grief of loss, and the interconnected Eternal Now of memories across the past, present, and future.” They “wrote this piece amidst a transitional moment where some important chapters in my life were coming to a close just as new chapters were beginning to open.” A vague notion, but the music is certainly metamorphic, the saxophone molting several times into something else. Like a self, new and strange but still the same, the same data reinterpreted and rearranged.
The record ends with the sound of rain, that sound of impermanence. The oldest spells and rituals pleaded for it, the replenishment of the world that also washes away all trace, drowns out all music, usurps all other sounds. Having passed through Pulice’s portal, we end with a solitary saxophone in the rain. Is this the past or the distant future? The portal is shrinking, an iris out to black. In one sense, Pulice’s spellcasting is the sheer sound they can create. But it’s time-travel, too. It’s only 22 minutes of music but there are centuries between its soundscapes, the pulsating future yielding to a melancholy downpour, somewhere farther in the future or the past.
4.
A saxophone is silence. When Patrick Shiroishi descended into a Los Angeles parking lot late at night with a saxophone, two microphones, and a gockenspiel, two other instruments were already there: the dormant concrete lung of a parking deck and the silence, roaring in the emptiness between things.
I was too young to hear silence begins with several seconds of silence. A saxophone sounds abruptly, somewhere over there, like a honk. Some staccato squawks, then a note almost like a fart. It sounds like Shiroishi is testing out the instrument for the first time, mouthing at the saxophone’s reed in spurts and twitches. The sound of water somewhere, dripping, and then suddenly the sax again, glimmering like a glass full of water. Then—honk! The record begins with an inventory of its possible sounds.
The saxophone spits, screeches, squeals, burps. But long sections of the record have no saxophone at all, just the nocturnal ambience of the parking lot, a white noise close to silence. Shiroishi has said that “The title kind of refers to when I was younger […] I would fill all the space with as many notes and as loud of volume as I could. Not saying that there’s any wrong way to play, but for me, after a while, I was confused with what I was trying to say.” This record is the opposite, an exercise in subtraction. Melodies gradually form, but are more like textures, not pieces of music so much as interstices in the silence. On “the soil that things grew from,” the saxophone sounds like a furious cloud of wasps that keeps vanishing. It’s as if he’s teaching us to listen, the disappearance of music becoming more interesting than its emergence.
Shiroishi recorded the record in one take, on October 28, 2020. Like 82 Days, I was too young to hear silence was born out of the pandemic. And like “If I Don’t See You,” it is an intentional improvisation. Though Shiroishi includes background noise like Nathanson, his project has more in common with Pulice’s: an attempt to listen by playing, to rediscover something already there but unheeded. The difference is that Shiroishi is listening to silence while Pulice is listening to sound.
The final song on Shiroishi’s record, “if only heaven would give me another ten years,” is the most recognizably structured, a soaring plea all the more powerful for being played in utter solitude, from underneath a silenced city. But over a minute before the track ends, the song ceases. The melody vanishes back into the record’s opening honks, then falls finally into silence, the humming roomtone of that Los Angeles subterrane. The stray notes that end the record are not aimless deconstruction. They are there to keep drawing out the silence, to keep you listening to the nothing, to keep you from tuning it out.
The fact of the parking lot is something I keep returning to, and why I find the record so true to its time, so contemporary even as it was recorded three years ago. Just as Shiroishi seeks to “play” silence, he also plays the city, breathing into the concrete and asphalt cavern as if it were some huge enchanted urn. “if only heaven” sounds like someone the city has buried alive, still breathing.
Shiroishi’s katabasis was into an urban emptiness that the pandemic had exposed as a larger void: the whole country a purgatorio of fluorescence and cement, of interstates and office parks, ziggurats of inextinguishable light. The fifth track on I was too young, “how will we get back to life again?,” flutters like an open question, still unresolved.
A saxophone is the sound of someone breathing, and breathing emphatically. Just as music implies silence, breathing implies its ceasing. A saxophone’s muteness: the prospect of death. No wonder, then, that when it sounds, it sounds like such relief. No wonder that even in grief these records all sound like something else. Like cities and seas, like emptiness and movement, like space and time. Like life: an endless elaboration of breath.
ben tapeworm
Postscript:
5.
Music is a transmutation of time more than it is a measure of it. I admire all four of these records, and consider them among the best of the year, because of overlapping qualities that they share to some degree, qualities that I think we could use more of: improvisation that is not spontaneity, intimacy that is not legibility, and grief that is not nostalgia.