Sax

Charles Lloyd is the last man standing of an inspired 1950s American saxophone generation, which included his late friends and contemporaries John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, and the now-retired Sonny Rollins. He once recalled to the Guardian that the free-jazz visionary Coleman had told him in 1956: “Man, you sure can play the saxophone, but that don’t have a lot to do with music.” Lloyd has been searching the world’s songs for the heartfelt secrets beyond technique ever since, and his voice-like sound and intuitive…

Murderer still at large Ninjaconor has casually dropped their DOS-adventure-inspired RPG, Sergeant Squidley: Space Cop, on PCs everywhere. Ninjaconor says that Sergeant Squidley is inspired by text-based DOS games, and I totally see the aesthetic. It has big crunchy pixels and lots of text boxes. However, looking at all the media for it – it looks like a dating sim. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz8yPQ_yxzo It might be partially due to the eponymous police-thing browsing a dating site, but that’s not what I’m…

What is it with Walter Smith III and “casual”? The Texas saxophonist’s debut album in 2005 was titled Casually Introducing, and a decade later, on his fourth, he assured us he was Still Casual. For his debut on Blue Note he has gathered that album’s six-strong cast for Return to Casual, on which he restates his qualities as a tenor sax player for our times, his airy tone echoing the past – specifically, Dexter Gordon – while embracing the hard-nosed intricacy of post-bop.It’s an engaging and diverse set of originals, the…

During a fallow work period in the early 2000s, saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin took matters into her own hands. “People weren’t calling me for gigs, so I started jumping on their stages to get them to hire me,” she says. Two attempts to crash a Prince gig in Las Vegas were thwarted, first by the singer’s unexpected medley of unsuitable a cappella numbers and then by a bouncer. After Prince read about the commotion, he invited Benjamin to try out for his band, and she played for two weekends at the end of his residency. “I…

Anthony Ortega did almost everything imaginable in a music career that stretched over 70 years that included leading a weekly Sunday jam session — into his mid-90s — until his health began to fail in August.He collaborated with Frank Sinatra and Frank Zappa, Tony Bennett and Tony Orlando, Marvin Gaye and Quincy Jones. He performed on film soundtracks, including playing the bravura improvised sax solo in the Oscar-nominated “An Unmarried Woman” and was in the house bands for ABC’s “The Julie Andrews Show” and “The Redd…

Former Los Angeles Dodgers player Steve Sax has issued a statement saying that his 33-year-old son who had always dreamed of being a pilot was among five U.S. Marines killed during a training flight crash earlier this week in the California desert. Capt. John J. Sax was among the aircrew of an Osprey tiltrotor aircraft that went down during training in a remote area in Imperial County, about 115 miles (185 kilometers) east of San Diego and about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Yuma, Arizona. “It is with…