The saxophone was created to mimic the human voice and I think that's why I gravitated toward the saxophone eventually. I'd loved the clarinet, but there's something about the saxophone that just grabs you.
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.
My mother was the only musician. She played piano and she sang. She also played saxophone. And she played at home a lot.
I've played drums since I was 15. My sisters and I all played instruments. I kind of started with piano and then I actually played saxophone with a jazz band in middle school. So, any knowledge I had of jazz music was from playing alto-sax back then.
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 played saxophone and trumpet. Pretty nerdy.
I played music my whole life - piano, saxophone.
I practiced saxophone eight hours a day for the first two years I played.
When you play a sax, that saxophone is irreverent. It's noisy; it's a trickster... you cannot hide the saxophone in your hands, so it's a good teacher.
When I was little I got to dribble the ball around while my older brother Paul, who played for a long time for Kilmarnock, my dad and my uncle Jimmy - who was at Celtic as a kid and played with Morton and Cambridge City - kicked it hard and I got punted out the way. But gradually I got allowed into the game.
I tried many sports like football, baseball, and swimming. I even played saxophone and piano.
Nobody played instruments in my family. My father got that bug and said he wants his son to play saxophone.
I can't play any horns. Every time I tried to take saxophone lessons as a kid ... I can't whistle. I don't know if that has anything to do with.
When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.
My central quest was to have a piece played on the saxophone sound like more than one instrument, exploiting different registers and wide interval leaps.
I originally started playing saxophone. I started singing a little bit when I got into middle school, when I realized girls didn't really date the dude with the saxophone.