It started with Sneakers. A winter night, a university campus, a snowstorm. A man is about to be arrested. His friend abandons him to his fate. It’s a hacker-heist film, lots of famous actors looking at computer monitors in the dark, but really it’s the music that stars. Fidgety piano parts. Throbs of choir. The score opens with strings, then a motif on soprano saxophone. For me, sitting in the movie theater, that saxophone part was atmosphere, mystery, a sense of longing. The start of something I didn’t want to end.
“It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so,” Frank O’Hara once wrote. The soprano saxophone can be difficult to love. It is not curvy like other saxes. Its sound is high-pitched and reedy. Perhaps it doesn’t know it’s not an oboe. It is the adolescent male of woodwinds, aggressively unsure, with a sound both despised and vastly popular. The Pied Piper to fans of the Dave Matthews Band. The voice of Breathless by Kenny G, one of the most most-hated instrumental albums of all time, also the bestselling album ever. And it’s the key to John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, one of the most critically adored.
Branford Marseilis, the saxophonist behind the Sneakers theme, switches between soprano and tenor, like Coltrane did. He’s known for bridging pop and austere. For me, he’s a touchstone: I saw him play with the Grateful Dead at Nassau Coliseum; I keep his live solo album, In My Solitude: Live at Grace Cathedral, downloaded on my phone. For me, the sound of a soprano saxophone is a gondola, and it all goes back to Sneakers. A dark night, snowfall, a mystery unresolved. The sound of anticipation. The beauty of what hasn’t happened yet.