Great Players Who sparked your love of Sax music

[oldsaxplayer]

I know that a lot of us think of the jazz greats when we think of great sax players but what track or player was the initial spark that lit the flame of love for the sax and sax music.

I think it was the sax part in careless whisper played by Steve Gregory that started it all and the the sax solo from "Will you" by Hazel O Conner can't remember who the sax player was but someone will tell me

Who was it for you?

mamos

Charlie Parker playing Donna Lee. My mouth dropped on the floor and hasn't really moved since. Then I heard Coltrane on Blue Train and Ornette Coleman witn Prime Time. I was hooked!

 

[mark_addy]

...and I lived in NYC, so there were many great horn players, even the buskers on the streets.

I've been reading through some of these posts, and this comment jumped out at me. When I had a 'proper job' I got to attend three conferences in the USA - two in NYC and one in LA. Both times in NYC I stayed in Manhattan - the conference was in the Javits, for those that know it - and kept the cost down by it being 'fun to stay at the YMCA'. The standard of buskers, and people doing really small-time gigs in various tiny clubs in the Village which I found by trawling through the Rough Guide - absolutely blew me away. As a bonus, on the second trip an enthusiastic postgrad got tickets for Tower of Power at BB King's club (two sets, we got kicked out after one and the next crowd came in - how did that bari player manage it!) and also I picked up a baritone off a bloke who met me at his office (as I remember) in a deal I had set up using American Ebay, when I knew I had clearance to go to the conference. It was cheap (in UK terms), that was the attraction, and trying to play it is what recently drew me here. That was 22 years ago, in the BC era (Before Children). I first picked up a sax (my Dad's, though he no longer played it) almost 50 years ago. Ouch.