Roscoe Mitchell's Wolf Tones

A musician's "voice" is not simply a metaphor. No two creative instrumentalists ever sound quite alike. Even on the piano, the touch and attack of Ashkenazy are immediately distinguishable from those of Brendel or Gould. And so it is, right through the orchestra, even if it takes a certain refinement of perception to tell one oboe soloist from another.

The saxophone represents a special case. It is an instrument that, for reasons of design and history, almost entirely depends on the personality of the player. The peculiarities of its manufacture--the saxophone family is all conical-bored and overblows at the octave--and its emergence at a time when the basic language of the classical instrumentarium was well established, bequeathed it a curiously marginal status. Despite the enthusiasm of Hector Berlioz and occasional appearances in the nineteenth-century orchestra, the saxophone's apparent destiny was to play a down-market role in vernacular music: marching bands, pit orchestras, bal musette and, of course, jazz.

All instruments--Strads, Gazzelloni's titanium flute--have "wolf tones," places on the instrument where the specific design or that particular instrument's history requires the player to alter technique to keep it in pitch. The saxophone has nothing but. A basic scale played on a tenor saxophone has less character than those same notes written on a stave, and yet most jazz fans will identify the great saxophonists from the shortest phrase or measure. Their voices are as distinctive as the whorls and loops of a fingerprint, or the particular cadence and timbre of a speaking voice.

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