A Quote by Joy Harjo

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. — © Joy Harjo
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.
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 like what Oliver Lakes does on the saxophone. The saxophone comes pretty close to the sound of the human voice and when Oliver plays with other sax players, it's like a dialogue.
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.
I play saxophone, I play tenor sax.
Throughout the evening I would be recording these long saxophone delays and about four hours into the concert, if I wanted to take a break I would just play back the saxophone.
I was [ on Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition] with Ralph Bowen, and Joel Frahm, Jimmy Greene, John Ellis. You can't play the saxophone better than any of those guys play. So many of those things that those guys could do I wish I could do now, let alone then.
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.
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.
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 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.
That's the beautiful thing about the saxophone. It can peacefully coexist with just about anything - whether it's hip-hop, rap, rock music, pop, R&B or jazz, there's a place for the saxophone in all of those styles.
I love the sound of the saxophone. It became my singing voice, and it sounds so human. The saxophone could carry the words past the border of words. It can carry it a little bit farther.
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.'
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.
So I'm looking to the saxophone as a resource which has its own unique set of possibilities. I'm looking to exploit them and develop them and have the fullest range of possibilities of the saxophone be known.
Switch to piano! No. Really, if you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it's like the human voice. Of course, it would be best if you could actually sing with your own voice. The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. Therefore, the challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument or 'voice' that is outside of your body. I love that challenge and have for over forty-five years. As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.
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