Clarity Within Complexity

Whereabouts in the world are you, Simon? I'm in the mountains above Santa Fe, New Mexico in the United States.

That's beautiful.

Lovely weather at the moment, is it? Getting

warmer? Yes, actually incredible weather the past couple of days.

And for those of you listening, you can't see this, but I can see behind Simon is at least two or three saxophones hanging on the wall.

So you're into jazz or just collect? No, I grew

up playing saxophone, jazz and funk mostly and blues.

So I grew up playing them, got a degree in it when I went to college.

college.

I don't play as much as I used to but I've kind of transitioned more to string instruments because you can just pick them up off the ground and strum them for a couple minutes.

It was always one of my lifelong ambitions was to play the sax our son he had lessons when he was when he was a child so we got him an alto sax and we still got it somewhere and i always wished that i could just i'm talking about going to a party and someone has a sax on their wall you walk up to it grab it and you just peel off baker street in the corner and just and just hang it back up and go that's it yeah just that one song or something just just feel a poor thing out of a sax why saxophone for you I think it's, I don't know, it's just that kind of, it's an iconic instrument, isn't it? It's got that sort of vibe about it that sort of, I don't know, trumpet's a bit too shouty.

And I think saxophone is really subtle and sound that comes out of it.

I think that's what it is.

It just drew me into that kind of, it's a friendlier

sound, I think.

It's got quite a mythology around it too.

There's a great book, like a biography of the saxophone called The Devil's Horn, which is really fun.

Well, and yeah, the

person who

created it was

he had the factory bombed a couple times because he was such a threat to the kind of rigid military band establishment as he was creating an instrument to attempt to replace it.

And then it kind of carried over this mythos to the United States where it began to represent kind of like an erotic soul that then kind of got picked up.

in jazz also often people attribute it to because it's a the reed instrument really mimics the human voice a lot and then has a lot of like breath and flexibility that the brasses didn't so it was seen as like a yeah a threat to rigid structured its establishment in in the music world i Is it the only brass that has a reed then? Is that, is that, it's, it's unique? No, there's a bunch of woodwinds.

So like a clarinet is also a woodwind.

Yeah, but