Top 55 Saxophone Quotes

You can make a saxophone into an electric organ; you can do everything with it.

Play difficult and interesting things. If you play boring things, you risk losing your appetite. Saxophone can be tedious with too much of the same.

I wanted an electric train for Christmas but I got the saxophone instead.

I’ve been working on the soprano saxophone for 40 years, and the possibilities are astounding. It’s up to you, the only limit is the imagination.

The saxophone is a very interesting machine, but I’m more interested in music.

Charlie Parker is my greatest inspiration as a saxophone player – anything that involves him entails a large amount of respect.

My father was in a dance band, and I wanted to do what he did, play the saxophone, but I couldn’t blow a note, so he suggested the guitar. Chromatic harmonica was actually my first instrument, and I got very good at it – not quite Stevie Wonder, but very good.

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.

If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it’s like the human voice.

My secret dream has always been to be a jazz musician. I tried the saxophone for a year or two when I was younger, but unfortunately I had to face the fact that I was not really talented!

Talking about the all night concerts, I did some of the first all night concerts back in the 60’s with this little harmonium, and I also had saxophone taped delays.

The only memory I have of playing the saxophone was in a school play. We put on ‘Grease,’ which is still one of my favorite movies. I played Danny, and I slid out on my knees and played a really out-of-tune ‘Blue Moon.’

I enjoy playing the band as the band. I ‘be’ the whole band and I’m playing the drums, I’m playing the guitar, I’m playing the saxophone. To me, the most wonderful thing about playing music is that.

I decided to play the saxophone because it was the most obvious instrument in my family. There were a lot of saxophone players in my family, and there were extra saxophones, so that was an easy one to pick up. It was fun – it was okay – it just wasn’t me. It didn’t feel like my instrument, so I never followed through.

I worked with a guy, I can’t think of his name, him and his wife, and one of them had a saxophone and the other played drums. It wasn’t a regular job but I did a few gigs around home with them.

I feel I’m most successful when I’m playing a concert, and it doesn’t necessarily seem like I’m playing a saxophone but am coming off more like an orchestra or something like that.

I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that’s where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy’s band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, ‘You want to play?’

My aunt Ruth Brown was a jazz musician. I got hooked on it at a young age, understanding what John Coltrane was doing playing two notes on the saxophone at the same time, which is impossible.

Guitars, there was rock ‘n’ roll. Saxophone, jazz. Now we have the computer and there’s this electronic thing happening in music that is somewhat superhuman.

Sometimes a sound gets overused. There is such a thing as a good saxophone, but it’s like those fields in agriculture – they need to rest for a year or so. You need time to burn all the saxophones and start from scratch.

The sax solo as we know it today would not exist without Gerry Rafferty. His 1978 soft-rock classic ‘Baker Street’ has to be the ‘Ulysses’ of rock & roll saxophone, giving the entire chorus over to Raphael Ravenscroft’s sax solo, creating one of the Seventies’ most enduringly creepy sounds.

I just want to play like Jimi Hendrix. I love other forms of music and wish I could play classical piano, or saxophone like John Coltrane, but that will never happen. Because my nature is to play electric guitar really well and to emulate my heroes from the late 1960s.

I was joked by a lot of older musicians because I was playing saxophone over trap beats or future bounce beats, and it just wasn’t what you do. They were just like play some John Coltrane and get in the corner. But that’s just not how I work.

Usually I can hear the pianos, the saxophone, and usually I can hear Ronnie. But I really need to listen to Keith and Mick. The rest of the band is sort of an embellishment to that.

I grew up playing the saxophone. I joined the jazz band in high school, but somewhere along the way I realized the guys who strummed acoustic guitars at parties were the ones who got the attention. So I asked a friend to show me a few chords, and when I moved to L.A. I spent a lot of time practicing my guitar.

I had an idea when I was 18 or 19 to start tutoring people, like the way that people get tutored in saxophone or guitar, but for production. I really enjoyed it, but I don’t have time for that any more.

Most footballers play golf for five or six hours. I’d rather play my saxophone. I get out to gigs when I can.

When I was five years old, my parents gave me a drum set for Christmas. My mom played the piano, and Dad played the saxophone badly. But that Christmas morning, I remember we all played together, and I thought it was the greatest day ever.

Cello is my first instrument, then piano, drums, bass, violin, recorder, saxophone, but I’d never play them live!

As a musician, your instrument is almost predetermined. I had played drums, piano, clarinet, but when I heard Wayne Shorter play the saxophone, I knew that sound is what I wanted.

I was focusing on sax while at Berklee, but then I started to play Brazilian choro and Colombian music. I was doing more folkloric stuff on the clarinet because it works better. Finally, I realized I was working more on the clarinet than the saxophone, and I started to feel more comfortable on it.

I understood that if I wanted to work, the saxophone was the main instrument. The clarinet was what we call a double.

Carlos Sosa, the saxophone player for Zac Brown Band, and I worked up two songs for ‘When You’re Feeling Sick.’ They were a blast to work on. The songs are real upbeat and silly.

I remember once, when I started writing for the alto saxophone, a saxophonist told me to think of it as being like a cross between an oboe and a viola, but louder.

Actually, when I was in elementary school, I saw a saxophone. A band came to my school, and I saw this guy get up and play this solo. And I said, ‘Oh man, what is that! That must be fantastic!’

A lot of people at the highest level, I never listened to. It was hard for me to listen to a whole lot of stuff. It didn’t get there for me. Al Green, who’s maybe my favorite male singer – to me, Al Green sounds like a saxophone player.

I would like to say a few things about that photo in ‘Tatler’. I have no regrets. The article was about the 20 cleverest people in England, covered up only by the thing that makes them clever. A saxophonist, for example, had only his saxophone, and an artist, his easel. So I was covered by books.

I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone.

As a horn player, the greatest compliment one can get is when a person comes to you and says, ‘I heard this saxophone on the radio the other day and I knew it was you. I don’t know the song, but I know it was you on sax.’

My mother was the only musician. She played piano and she sang. She also played saxophone. And she played at home a lot.

And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I’m going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I’m going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.

I wanted to play saxophone, but all I could get were a few squeaks.

Any saxophone player will have those influences come through in their music in a very different way. I can listen to the same 10 sax players as someone else for my entire life, and we’ll both play completely differently. That’s the beauty of being a musician.

I always hated jazz guitar. I loved jazz saxophone but I hated jazz guitar. If I would buy an organ trio record I would make sure I’d buy one that did not have a guitar player on it. The sound was awful!

You can work on the saxophone alone, but ultimately you must perform with others.

I have not practiced saxophone since 1980. I mean, not one note. I do not pick it up in my house, and that’s the end of it.

I play saxophone, I play tenor sax.

My thing was, I loved music. I played music: I played the saxophone. So the little bit of music knowhow I had, I tried to implement that in every thing I did, from my style, my cadence, the way I tried to pause and stagnate it; that all came from John Coltrane and listening to jazz albums. Trying to rhyme like a jazz player.

My third day playing saxophone, I was in front of a congregation. I still didn’t know the names of all the notes. I was playing by ear, following along, but it was such an encouraging environment, I couldn’t fail. It was all, ‘Yeah baby, you sound real good’ no matter what you play. It was a great way to learn.