This week I am listening to one song on repeat in the car, every day: “Way Back Home,” featuring Ronnie Cuber on baritone saxophone, from Steve Gadd and Friends’ 2010 album Live at Voce.

Saxophone is, I guess, a hard thing to love now? Two NYT pieces in the last week say sax is suss: a hot take on the current preponderance of the instrument at weddings, and “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Alto Saxophone” (because if it can’t be done in 5 minutes, it can’t be worth doing). It is certainly the instrument that never sounds like anything else. You can mute a trumpet, you can prepare a piano, and if you amplify anything you can run it through yards of effects—but sax is sax.

I have been on a guided saxophone tour for the last few weeks, led by my youngest son. I was spinning Getz / Giberto in the car at pickup one afternoon, and he had questions. So I explained the three primary sax variants one finds in the wild. The alto: the intellectual’s horn, that of our first alchemist Charlie Parker and later technicians like Paul Desmond. The tenor: the alto’s soulful uncle, who can’t hold down a job but is out wailing on the bridge every night. Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Coltrane and of course Mt. Getz. (The fraught history of the soprano is excused for another day.)

And the baritone…well, no bari player came to mind. So I asked Spotify for one, and it coughed up this record. Thanks, algorithm! What a gem! (Also a favorite of Donald Fagen, according to the YouTube link above: my excellent taste is affirmed.)

Against its better-pedigreed colleagues, the bari sax always sounds like your sketchy friend leaning across the table to tell a dirty joke. The bari knows it is here for its personality, and leans into it. Perhaps the bari is the trombone of the woodwinds: it eludes its reputation only by occasionally embracing it.

I do not know anything about Ronnie Cuber other than his long long resume on Wikipedia, and the fact that he played in the SNL band. I think I recognize his tone from bumper music in the years when you had to be up at midnight to hear it. He would probably be considered a very accessible player. “Way Back Home” has no arch bebop changes, is not “out” in the slightest. It is boogie music, feel-good music. A two-chord vamp that only goes to the third when you cannot take the pressure anymore; puts me in mind of Joe Zawinul’s “Mercy Mercy Mercy”, which despite Cannonball Adderley’s intro about persevering through adversity has always been a joyous song to me. Here to move your booty, not push you through the doorways of perception.

And that tone! The growl and the hum and the whine. I have seen one photo of this hulking man and am put in mind of Mingus with his double bass: parity between player and instrument, clash of the heavyweights. I am pretending I know everything I need to know about him from that Wikipedia page, and I like every single bit of it. I am not looking up any more: I do not want to know if he treated his collaborators like garbage or sold his horn for smack. I want to just climb inside that tone and spend a long, lazy weekend sliding down the surface. He enjoys the lowest honks of the horn and is not afraid to let you love them too. He knows his instrument is ridiculous on the way to being sublime: that the two are inseparable.

And he knows he can do anything he wants on it, and a big part of the joy of listening to him is the physical feat he is pulling off. Because that is the other thing about bari sax that can’t be ignored: its size. Its weight. I am finding curiously variable numbers online, and do not have one handy to check. Does it weigh twenty pounds? The neck strap introduces a whole new problem in the long term I bet. Posture implications. More than the weight, though, is the distance your air column has to traverse. All the way down to those lower notes, with the big clanging pads, is four feet at least. Bari is a physical commitment.

I played bari for a couple of years in my high school jazz band. I was a competent clarinetist, and my indulgent band director told me I was welcome to audition if I could learn the bari. If I could hang, maybe there would be a clarinet feature in the future. Jazz band practiced at 7:15 in the morning twice a week, is my memory: you had to want to be there. I had to muscle that metal into submission almost before I was awake.

I learned it well enough to honk along with the real saxophonists. Sax is nominally simpler than clarinet, thanks to Adolphe’s ingenious design that makes the same fingerings work for the same notes all up and down its range, vs. the clarinet, which puts you off a fifth in between octaves. And I did hang! True to his word, we did “Woodchopper’s Ball” passably, and I made an absolute wreck of Jobim’s “Wave” at a festival once.

But the real long-term benefit for me was getting to spend hours up close and personal with a horn that big. Cuber does not seem to notice the heft of the thing. His dexterity and speed is improbable, unimaginable. Especially when you have also tried to wrestle with it and been bested. I love his playing because I know how much work it is.

I got out my alto* this week, inspired by Cuber’s deftness and tone, and was immediately reminded how you either are married to your instrument or struggle with it.

And I struggle on sax! Twenty years ago, I joined a band in Chapel Hill for a few months on that alto. They were named, gloriously, “The Guns of Navarone.” A serious montunos-for-miles cubop piano player, an upright bassist, a traps drummer, and a conga player. And somehow me. I knew by the second rehearsal that I was way outclassed by this project, but they kept me on, so I stayed. We worked up two sets–“Caravan,” some Horace Silver maybe?–and I played one gig in a dim weeknight room on Rosemary Street. I remember the piano player glaring at my honking, keening tone all night, waiting for my to materialize into the player of his dreams but remaining the same mess I had been in rehearsal. I quit the next day, and went back to being a well-satisfied drummer ever since.

But I am going to keep up my honking and keening regardless. My saxophone-remembering has every place on this blog, because music-making will always be a physical act. Most of the music I love comes from real people and objects working at each other and finding harmony, or at least detente.

And computers can now emulate nearly any sound with alarming fidelity. In my last DC band we would haul an actual Rhodes stage piano up and down stairs into second-floor clubs, cursing its weight and size all the way. Now my friend who played that Rhodes gets all its sounds and more (Hammond organ!) out of a tiny Nord that weighs less than my cymbal bag, and I am sure his back thanks him for it.

The music I most love lets you hear a person and an instrument working it out together. I love John Bonham’s drumming because I can hear his right foot on that (squeaky) Ludwig Speed-King, can hear the lightness and the thunder exactly where he put it before you could quantize a tempo. I love Wynton Marsalis on “Jig’s Jig” because I can hear his breath easing over the top of his figures, his conservatory nimbleness trying to ooze into something looser. I love Steve Williams’ (oops, Billy Hart’s) quarter-note ride behind Shirley Horn because his swing is implied, is in the air around the notes. I love music that is people with things in the world.

And I love Ronnie Cuber’s peace with his horn and the world he makes in it. Check it out–and then go play some yourself today, how about? Go ahead: get out your horn from high school, if it has survived the moves and yard sales, and see what you got today. I bet you’ll care less about getting it right, about being “good,” than you once did—because those are the concerns of children, aren’t they? Whether you sound “good enough”?

Well, the concerns of children and pros like Cuber, and thank god for them. But the rest of us just get to play today, if we want. Go play in the world; go be part of it. It is still there–both the music, and the world–and it is yours for the making.

*My alto sax was a gift from my band director, a saxophonist himself. It was his marching horn when he was a student at the University of Georgia. A splendid Noblet “Serie Maville,” it is in great shape, no leaky pads. If I could just get my embouchure in step with my horn, I would be flying high! So grateful to have his horn here, and so grateful to that man—and his co-director, and their extraordinary public school band program–that made my musical life so satisfying and durable. Go Dawgs, B.C.!

Photo from Wikipedia, above.