My suggested videos

Here are some terrific examples of the wonderful flexibility of the saxophone. All the pieces are part of the history of the instrument and most are on the performance lists of university programs everywhere.

When you go to these you will be led to numerous other performances by these and other players.

These are in no particular order. Enjoy!

1. Boots Randolph's famous Yakety Sax has been used in arrangements for school and concert bands and perhaps most famously in the 80's Benny Hill show. Boots was a fixture on the Nashville recording scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcq_xLi2NGo

2. Rudy Wiedoeft was the most well-known of the 1920's Vaudevillian saxophonists. He performed on the now extinct C melody sax. Saxema was one of his many 'saxophonistic' compositions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzyQ5AkUHwA

3. Arno Bornkamp is the most well known of this generation's Dutch saxophonists. Here he performs Eugene Bozza's Aria. This is often used as one of the audition pieces for many music schools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IilvLMQP_WI

4. The great French player Jean Marie Londeix performs Claude Pascal's Sonatine.  I played this on my first recital program. Jean Marie was a classmate of my teacher Paul Brodie when they studied in Paris with Marcel Mule.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6H95ohBXNY

5. In this French documentary from the 70s many of the greatest players can be seen and heard (albeit in French). My own teacher for many years, Paul Brodie, performs on the rare sopranino saxophone (smaller than the soprano).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tngaBiZJE_o&t=474s

6. Paul Desmond performs his famous composition Take Five.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT1FHNrmPj8

7. Marcel Mule was the teacher of a whole generation of great players including Paul Brodie, Jean Marie Londeix . Fred Hemke and Eugene Rousseau. Here he plays Paul Bonneau's Caprice en Forme de Valse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe4QCxOYrOs

8. Here is Fred Hemke's final concert at North Western University. I had the honour of having a lesson in Hemke's studio early in my career.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_AAiXHxK30

9. Daniel Deffayet playing the Old Castle by Modeste Mussorgsky with the Berlin Philharmonic. This is one of the earliest pieces for saxophone with orchestra and most of my students must learn it. His sound is unique. We met at the World Saxophone Conference in Maryland in 1987.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W0itdLq1RE

10. Sigurd Rascher was one of the early concert saxophonists of international stature. Here plays the Rumba by Maurice Whitney. This is now a standard part of repertoire for high school players.  - although not many play the extremely high notes that Rascher made famous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npH-DULg5lI

11. Eugene Rousseau was part of the development of the Yamaha saxophones. I attended his week long workshop at Indiana U in Bloomington in the 80s and he also came to McMaster U in Hamilton Ontario when I was teaching there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_7v7_4XmZc&t=324s

12. Dr. Rousseau playing Stardust

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeq958fjS5c

13. Nobuya Sugawa is Japan's premier concert saxophonist. Here is plays Bozza's Aria as well as Darius Milhaud's Scaramouche Suite and Fuzzy Bird Sonata by Takashi Yoshimatsu. We met when he performed at the University of Toronto in 2007. I usually have a student working on the Milhaud in my university program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMcQ3hAdqIs&t=587s

14. Joanne Bender's Green Earth Suite is an example of the wonderful lyricism that the tenor saxophone is capable of producing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA02r20hGiU