The Joy of Sax: Playground Love, Air & Gordon Tracks

originally published: 12/15/13

A magic hour fever dream of falling deeply, dangerously in love. The light is a fading pink gold and you’re alone together spinning gradually closer. Then, contact. Your senses explode. Suddenly, you can hear the sunset and it sounds like the smoothest Saxophone solo you could dream of. The kind of Solo that everyone naturally associates with The Sax, as a shorthand to a kind of implied, or even explicit, physical love; the stuff of 80’s-blue neon, soft filters, and late night television. This is the Alpha Solo, that from which all those other poorer solos are descended.

There is not a hint of sharpness to it. It flows with the liquid inevitability of the Amazon, and is the sound of rooms mood lit with recessed lighting hidden by dark woods. Where others imply a roll in the hay, this is a slow search through high thread count for something both physical and not. The subtle electricity of another’s touch and the force that draws it.

And yet as The Sax binds, there’s a constant threat from the very first moments of the piano’s gently urgent Bernard Herrmann-esque S.O.S. The song’s strings sound as if they’re slowly weeping like a tree in a November breeze and hint at some hidden secret, fear, or tragedy lying unspoken in the narrow shadow between spoons. While the love in the song may be spoken of in the cosmos of childhood swing sets, seesaws, and slides, anyone who’s been in love knows that it creates an entire universe from the twin suns that burn only for the light and warmth of each other, regardless of when or where it’s found

The Saxophone is the gravity in this universe. It ties together invisibly even as other forces work to separate and speaks in sotto voce volumes that carry us through to the end.