Best musicians I've seen - 3

OK, time to forget the slowly unfolding Brexit train wreck, Everton's mediocrity and the oncoming Cold War and get back to music. And a cop out because, while I reflect on my favourite guitarist performances, here's my 3rd choice of the best musicians I happen to have seen. This time it's a musician who blows into the instrument.

So my brass player - indeed my brass section - is Dick Heckstall-Smith who I saw playing saxophone with Colosseum in 1971. Heckstall-Smith started out as a jazz player and, via John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, was another jazz musician who hopped on to the prog rock bandwagon. Which of course gave him ample opportunity for extemporisation. His party piece, which is not that unusual but at the time I'd never seen anyone else do it, was to play two saxes simultaneously. Using a tenor and alto it did actually sound like a brass section. The knack here is to be able to play the keys on both instruments at once, which means using your "wrong" hand on one of them. A bit like playing a keyboard from the wrong side (see Best Musicians I've seen - 2, 16 October 2017). But unlike Keith Emerson, Heckstall-Smith didn't just (or even) do this for showmanship, but pulled it off several times in a gig to fit the music. There's a good example only 40 seconds or so into this live video clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKdjcar9fr0 (not sure about the colour on this vid - looks like Hiseman is wearing lipstick a few years before glam rock!).

And in one of my favourite tracks, which I have eulogised before - the live version of Rope Ladder to the Moon (see Best Mysicians I've Seen - 1, 30 September 2017) -Heckstall-Smith's perfectly judged sax break takes off, for me, when the second sax kicks in. Always makes me tingle. (Hear it on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joujh2jLL1A.  Jump to the start of the sax break, if you really must, at about 2:41; the alto sax joins in at 3:41).

Now Heckstall-Smith - an unlikely hero for long haired students in the early 70s as he already caused the lights to glint off his bald pate in his mid 30s - is by no means the only sax player to pull off this trick and, for all I know, it's easy peasy, though I suspect not.

The American jazz legend Rahsaan Roland Kirk was well known for playing multiple instruments. Kirk would play two or even three saxes at once. In addition to sax, clarinet, flute and cor anglais, Wikipedia lists the "nose flute" as one of his instruments. Ah, so that's how he did it! But what did he use to finger the keys on the third sax, I wonder? Actually, his technique was to use the instruments to play true chords, presumably with a note from each. I couldn't say whether Dick H-S was doing the same or not.

Another good sax player I saw, Davey Payne of Ian Dury's Blockheads, also pulled off the two saxes at once routine. Indeed, his Wikipedia page shows him playing two tenor saxes at once and you can hear him do it at the start of the sax break in Dury's biggest hit, Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick. Payne also came out of the jazz clubs to join one of the unlikelier new wave success stories.

Next time I'll have to come off the fence and go for my guitarist -  though there's bass to pick yet as well....