Presented at the North American Saxophone Alliance Biennial Conference, Arizona State University
March 7, 2020

Adrianne Honnold
PhD Candidate
University of Birmingham

The idea of justifying the study musical instruments may seem unnecessary to many of us here, but in the worlds of musicology, ethnomusicology, and popular music studies, research into the ways that musical instruments and the musicians who play them contribute to music-making is still evolving. Interestingly, this is also an area which warrants some attention from within our own saxophone community; research related to the saxophone and how it operates in popular music and culture has (perhaps) not received the attention that history or pedagogy have received. My dissertation is entitled “’Unacknowledged Ubiquity’: the saxophone in popular music”, and its overarching theme is the investigation of the saxophone and how it contributes meaning to popular music. The dissertation forms the basis of this lecture today, and I’m going to give an overview of the project and then focus on one of the key themes within the paper, which is the gendered identity and expression that the saxophone represents in popular music and culture.

This project began as a reaction to the re-emergence of the saxophone in hit pop songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 2010 and 2011. As a saxophonist, I immediately noticed the inclusion of the instrument in music that was being released by highly visible pop stars such as Katy Perry (‘Last Friday Night [T.G.I.F.]’ [2010]), Lady Gaga (‘Edge of Glory’ [2011]), Jason Derulo, Ariana Grande, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, as well as many others; the saxophone’s return also did not go unnoticed in the mainstream press, as evidenced by just a few of the headlines seen here.

The saxophone is a remarkably popular instrument; it circulates as a polysemous object, representing multiple identities such as cool, kitsch, as well as notions of race, gender, and sexuality (which is evident in some of the headlines scene here in slide 3). Due to its versatility, it is heard in genres from western classical to Afrobeat to electronic dance music to Carnatic music. It is for these reasons, and more, that the saxophone requires deeper investigation as an object laden with meanings. The instrument’s pervasiveness is hardly a matter for debate, and yet, the role of the saxophone in popular music has received very little scholarly attention. 'Unacknowledged ubiquity' is thus a fitting title for a study aimed at examining the saxophone as a meaningful musical artefact that characterises various socio-cultural touchstones. Ethnomusicologist A.J. Racy noted, ‘like living organisms, instruments adapt to different cultural settings, thus dropping or maintaining some of their older connotations and acquiring new functions and meanings’ (1999).

The central question to be answered by this research is…how does the saxophone contribute meaning to American popular music? While the instrument has signified various meanings over the course of its existence, through its vast iconography and both aural and visual representations, three principal themes that are associated with the saxophone are explored here: cool/kitsch, race, and gender/sexuality. Cool and kitsch are grouped together and so are gender and sexuality because they are closely connected to one another, and each of these key themes “intersect” with one another in important ways. The idea of intersectionality comes from influential law professor and feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw who essentially defined intersectionality in the 1980s as a way to theorize how race and gender effect one another, and this is one way to frame the discussion of the key themes in relation to the saxophone. How did the instrument come to be aligned with these notions of cool, kitsch, race, and gender or sexuality? How did the instrument’s associations with these themes develop over time, and how do they manifest themselves now, in contemporary mainstream popular music?

To answer the primary research question and to gain further insight into the saxophone in popular music, I did two things: 1) I interviewed saxophonists who perform with mainstream artists about their experiences and about their relationship with the instrument, and 2) I investigated the key themes of cool/kitsch, race, and gender/sexuality in three case studies. Each case study occupies a chapter in the dissertation and presents a popular song that prominently features the saxophone and examines the ways in which the saxophone signifies the key themes. The data collected in the interviews is woven throughout the three case studies and provides anecdotal evidence to support the idea of the socio-cultural significance of musical instruments.

So, you may be wondering who I interviewed for the project. The saxophonists that participated were Mindi Abair (Aerosmith, Backstreet Boys), Mike Burton (Mary J. Blige, Jill Scott, Patti Labelle), Jeff Coffin (Dave Matthews Band), Sal Lozano (Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney), Branford Marsalis (Sting, Grateful Dead), Lenny Pickett (Saturday Night Live Band, Katy Perry), Carlos Sosa (Jason Mraz, Kelly Clarkson), Jeff Watkins (James Brown, Joss Stone), and Kirk Whalum (Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross). I threw out a pretty large net and contacted many saxophonists who have performed in pop music (such as Ori Kaplan (Jason Derulo, Fifth Harmony), James King (M83, Fitz and the Tantrums), Terrace Martin (Kendrick Lamar), and many others) but in the end these are the wonderful people who had the time and agreed to be interviewed. (Quality over quantity; ethnographic studies don’t have to have large numbers of participants; they are not quantitative).

For context, here’s a brief description of two of the case studies that are included in the dissertation:

The saxophone connotes both cool and kitsch in the song and the video for ‘Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)’ in two primary ways: through Kenny G’s comedic turn as the saxophonist ‘Uncle Kenny’ in the video, and through Lenny Pickett’s incomparable playing style. They are two of the most famous and recognisable saxophonists in the United States, and it is a noteworthy aspect of the video that Kenny G was chosen to appear because he is even more easily recognizable than Pickett. They both reached a level of prominence through their recordings and performances in the 1980s, and while quite stylistically different from one another, both of their sounds are symbolic of the 1980s when they contributed to the saxophone’s unparalleled level of ubiquity in popular music (some might call it over-saturation; it went from being so cool to pretty uncool because of the oversaturation). In 2011 when ‘Last Friday Night’ was released, a saxophone solo had not been featured in a number one song on the Billboard Hot 100 since the early 1990s (Laughter, 2015; most likely “I Will Always Love You” (1992) Whitney Houston/Kirk Whalum, although there was also saxophone in Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” which was a #1 in 2005). The saxophone solo itself acts as an element of nostalgia, along with the cameo appearances of celebrities from the 1980s and 1990s. The celebrities featured in the video also represent contemporary popular culture touchstones of 2011, demonstrating an attempt by the video’s producers to actively encourage interpretation by various types of audiences. The saxophone serves as one of the many aesthetic signifiers of both nostalgia and kitsch, and this is supported by the conversation that occurs at the end of the video between Kathy Beth Terry and her parents. Feldman and Gibson, two of the celebrities from the 1980s that portray Terry’s parents, state that they had to come home early from the convention because they had to keep ‘Uncle Kenny’ from playing the sax again. ‘We can’t let that happen’, Feldman states, and this seems to be a satirical way of saying that Kenny’s return to saxophone playing denotes the return of pop music to the 1980s.

The second case study features analysis of Kendrick Lamar’s critically acclaimed song ‘Alright’ (2015) and explores how the saxophone is linked to notions of race in American popular music. In an article published for the American Music Review Will Fulton notes that Terrace Martin’s saxophone playing is significant on the album To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) because of the singular synthesis of jazz instrumentals with modern-day rap performance (Fulton, 2015). The title of this article, ‘The Performer as Historian’ bears out the idea that Lamar is acting as both historian and timely social commentator concurrently. I think that the improvised saxophone lines serve to invoke jazz in its mid-century heyday, when diligent and skilful African American musicians steadfastly affirmed their space in the musical landscape of America and achieved respect for themselves as instrumentalists and for the genre of jazz on the whole. This relates to what seems to be the over-arching theme of Lamar’s album, which in Martin’s words is, ‘…what it’s like to be black in this day and age in America’ (Charity, 2015). Martin was a co-producer of the album. ‘Alright’ is an example of a popular song that exhibits power through its conscientious treatment of social and political issues of race in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, the song is considered by many scholars and critics as the unofficial anthem of the movement. The saxophone contributes to this conscientiousness through its existence in the song as a reference to the power of past genres of African American music such as jazz, soul, and funk, and subsequently has the potential to represent black American creativity, hope, and progress. Jazz musicians and their musical signatures featured heavily on ‘Alright’ as well as the remainder of the album, and its success even prompted some critics to credit Lamar with helping to make jazz popular again (Cowie, 2015). The video is a cinematic reimagining of the struggle against systemic racism, and the image of Lamar floating above the streets seems to symbolise his attempt to rise above tenuous race relations, and in so doing, the intention is to influence others to remain hopeful. The hook of the song reinforces this concept by simply exclaiming, ‘we gon be alright’.

That brings us to the third key theme: gendered identity, expression, and performativity relating to the instrument. As many of us know, historically the saxophone has been played by both men and women, but it is generally considered to possess predominantly masculine traits and the majority of saxophonists are men. Advancements in gender equality in the music professions are being made, but it remains vital to discuss the various ways in which gendered identities relating to instrumental music performance affect the meanings portrayed by the saxophone in popular music and culture.

(So I’ve buried the lead a bit here, but…) what is Performativity?

Performativity is a bit of a nebulous term that emerged from literary and linguistic studies, and is defined as “the power of language to effect change in the world: language does not simply describe the world but may instead (or also) function as a form of social action” (Cavanaugh, 2015). Some practical examples are an umpire calling a strike or a judge announcing a judgment. The influential feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler expanded the definition of performativity by theorizing that gender is “performed”; generally, that people perform gender because of dominant societal constraints that label it as binary, (or black or white, male or female). In terms of music performance, both of these viewpoints on performativity combine to describe a form of expression that demands exploration of what is embodied in a performance, whether it’s through ‘repertoires, events, and practices’, and this musical definition also prioritizes the examination of socio-cultural environments in which performances exist (Davidson, 2015). So performativity includes what our bodies are doing while performing, and whether these actions represent our preconceived ideas of masculinity, femininity, or other, etc. If you take a look back at saxophone performances in popular music throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, a very masculine performing style was really the archetype of what we now see in mainstream popular music (Lenny Pickett, Clarence Clemons, etc, and even Sexy Sax Man or Sergio from SNL which are characters that make fun of this masculine performativity)

'The form, with its beautiful curves, is female. But when viewed from the side, it could also be an erection. Part of its appeal is that it’s never clear what it is…its ambiguous sexuality is very modern' (Londeix in Segell, 2005). This quote comes from Segell’s book The Devil’s Horn and I include it here not only because it’s interesting but also because it is an acknowledgement by one of the great saxophonists and pedagogues of the instrument as a strong signifier of gender and sexuality (and this also might be a reason for the instrument’s lasting popularity in mainstream music and culture: its ‘ambiguous sexuality’)

According to ethnomusicologist Veronica Doubleday, ‘musical instruments are important symbolic tools used within the construction of human gendered identities’ (2008, p. 6). It is important, then, to examine the saxophone’s predominantly masculine gendered identity. The saxophone is sometimes considered an extension of the male musician’s virility, and consequently it has been difficult for female saxophonists to be accepted or taken seriously. There have been excellent historiographies produced about female jazz musicians by Kristin McGee and women in popular music by Sheila Whiteley that illuminate the struggles that female musicians have faced throughout the twentieth century. Essentially, women have not been able to achieve the same heights and levels of respect as male instrumentalists, potentially due to the preconceived notions of what a saxophonist is supposed to look like. Doubleday notes, ‘…male instrumental musicianship may emerge as the cultural norm, with the female instrumentalist being seen as 'unthinkable' or deviant. The very image of a woman playing an instrument may be seen as 'weird,' awkward or laughable’ (Doubleday, 2008, p. 17). Stephen Cottrell, author of The Saxophone (Yale Series) contends that the saxophone can be seen ‘…both as a symbol of predatory phallic behaviour, and female sexual allure’ (quoted in Doubleday, 2008, p. 14). And while Cottrell goes into some detail listing many of the ways in which female saxophonists were performing in the United States and around the world and receiving recognition in the late nineteenth century, he also dutifully reminds us that this was not necessarily a sign of 'female musical independence,' but rather a novelty still controlled by men (Cottrell, 2012, p. 329). They were products of their time, but the renowned saxophone soloists in the United States, Louise Linden and Bessie Mecklem, were nevertheless influential for performing at very high standards. Mecklem made some of the very first solo saxophone recordings in the world, and the first references to the saxophone in the New York Times in the late 1880s and 1890s refer to her performances (Cottrell, 2012, p. 121). These early successes would prove novel, in some ways parallel to the historical trajectory of the instrument itself and its consideration as a novelty but also reflecting the undervalued and/or dismissed aspects of female performativity.

Although we can also discuss the two previous case studies within the context of gendered identity and expression and how the saxophone engages with those themes, the third case more obviously represents those themes in a more contemporary context. Ori Kaplan is the saxophonist in Jason Derulo’s hit song ‘Talk Dirty” (2013), and he has a very distinctive performance style.

‘Talk Dirty’, in brief, is about sex. It is minimally explicit, and as such circulates more widely because of its relatively inoffensive intimations about talking dirty as a precursor to sex. An important part of the formula for the song’s success was its articulation of exoticism which was achieved by featuring a saxophone solo characterised by Middle Eastern and/or Jewish musical traditions that centre on the harmonic minor scale. The majority of the musical material that provides the foundation for ‘Talk Dirty’ is borrowed from Balkan Beat Box’s song ‘Hermetico’, released in 2007. The salient feature of this song is that Ori Kaplan, the saxophonist, performs the hook; this sets the song apart from countless other mainstream hit songs that feature the saxophone in more traditional ways such as in a solo break or as a background instrument in a horn section. In just the first minute seen here, one can get the gist of the song and video which is intended to convey masculine gendered expression; in the world of music videos this masculine perspective and the objectification of women is quite a familiar trope (it can also be seen in Katy Perry’s video even though she is a female artist).

In addition to presenting harmonic material representative of his Israeli homeland, Kaplan’s saxophone performance style is physically powerful. In live performances he dances all over the stage while playing, and he blows a massive amount of air through the horn. The individual notes he plays almost break due to the force of the air; they come very close to splitting into a multiphonic or eliciting a squeak because he approaches the edge of overblowing the pitch. The fact that he is able to control this massive amount of air and keep the sound from breaking is a testament to his skill as a saxophonist. This aggressive approach lends itself to live performances, creating a sense of urgency and excitement in a masculine display of performativity. I believe that Kaplan’s powerful, masculine playing style can be heard in the hook of ‘Talk Dirty’ and indirectly contributes to the virility encapsulated in the song.

There are many examples from the interviews that illustrate the value of the ethnographic approaches utilized for the study and provide insight to the meanings that the saxophone represents in terms of the key themes of cool, kitsch, race, and gender, but I want to end with just a couple of relevant quotes from two of the study participants:

When asked if the saxophone is cool, Jeff Coffin said:

“It can be! I know it’s been uncool in my hands a few times! It's such a beautiful design...the curvature of the instrument itself and when you think about art, architecture, the human body, to me it's representing parts of that. It represents a very natural flow of things.”

I continued by asking, ‘so you’re saying that it’s visually attractive?’ and he continued:

“Absolutely. That we're connecting our body to that. In some ways it's sexual. I don't think overtly necessarily, but I think that's there. We see those curves. It's like the curve of the hip or the curve of the shoulder. I think that does come into play in some ways, subliminally, that exists. You're holding an instrument.” (Jeff Coffin, 2018)

The topic of sexuality as it relates to the saxophone is regularly broached; indeed, it is one of, if not the most discussed topics related to the instrument. Not only is the name of the instrument closely related to the word sex, but the physical appearance of the instrument represents sexuality in various ways. Some men (such as Jeff Coffin above) think of the instrument as a distinctly feminine object, with sexy curves, a feminine shape, and the ability to sound delicate. Other people think of the instrument as an extension of the phallus, unmistakably masculine in its form and ability to project power through sound. On the surface, this speaks to the instrument’s versatility, but on a different note, in both of these scenarios the assumption is that the player is a man with his hands controlling either the phallus or the feminine and curvaceous instrument. Neither of these scenarios resists the established norms that are attributed to the saxophone or the gender typecasting (as musicologist Rita Steblin calls it), and even though there were female saxophonists from the very earliest days after its invention, even in the twenty-first century when the saxophone is played by a woman it is seen as confusing because it does not adhere to the dominant patriarchal and cisgender norms. Steblin, in her article entitled “The Gender Stereotyping of Musical Instruments in the Western Tradition” (1995) begins by stating that, “…the gender stereotyping of musical instruments—that is, the labelling of instruments as being primarily male or female—is an aspect of the sociology of music which has had an enormous impact on the role of women in music history.” In a nutshell, Steblin traces the assignment of gender identities to instruments back to the 15th century, with Italian sculptures in Florence depicting trumpets and drums played by boys and psalteries (like a dulcimer) and lutes played by young girls. The noisy and raucous instruments were played by the boys and the calm, quiet, accompanying instruments were played by girls, symbolizing their role in society as “weak” and subservient. Steblin goes on to list several other examples of the gender division between “active and passive”, and also notes that wind instruments were not to be played by women because they did not align with the feminine ideal of “suave gentleness”; they might distort the face and cause the woman to be unattractive.

Mindi Abair spoke of this explicitly in her interview:

“You and I definitely don't fit the bill for what a saxophone player looks like. We will win any bar bet for what we do for a living! I think that it's great that we are a part of changing the perception of what a saxophone player looks like, sounds like, feels like. I think that there are a lot of women out there right now that have their own sound, that have their own vibe, and are just as successful as the men in their respective career paths whether it's jazz or it's rock. It's fun to watch it slowly but surely change. And it's going to be slow. It's interesting.” (Abair, 2018)

Abair also had a very entertaining story that encapsulates what it is like to shatter pre-conceived notions about saxophonists:

“I had a woman sit next to my mother at a show in Seattle years ago. I was playing with Jonathan Butler who is a South African artist, he's a black man from South Africa with a big urban audience. I walk out on stage in the middle of the song and finish out the song with him. As I walk out on stage, the woman sitting next to my mother stood up and said, 'What is that skinny little white bitch doing on stage?' And my mother shrunk down in her seat. By the time I finished the song with him, she stood up again and she goes, 'You go, you skinny little white bitch, you can play!”'

As Mindi alludes to above, the predominantly African American audience for which she was performing had pre-conceived ideas of what a saxophonist should look like; not only was her gender a factor but her whiteness also played a role in the assumption that she may not be a talented saxophonist. She had to earn the audience’s respect through her performance. Mindi and I and countless others have experienced these preconceptions at work in our professional careers. Contemporary female saxophonists continually attempt to overcome notions of masculine performativity and still strive for respect in performance environments, although these biases do seem to be slowly eroding. Barriers are being broken every day and the important thing is to acknowledge where we’ve been to be able to move forward; research into the ability of musical instruments to convey meaning and power in contemporary music and culture is one way to continue the forward momentum.

Gendered Identities and Performativity relating to the Saxophone in Popular Music