Steve Coleman Archives Forum

Joined : 21 Sep 2007 Posts : 1 Localisation : Germany

Hi,

I`m a big fan of steves alto playing. Does anybody know his actual saxophone setup (sax, mouthpiece, reeds) ?

thanks in advance

andreas
germany

Joined : 20 Apr 2006 Posts : 57 Localisation : Rome

In the last album ( Invisible paths : first scattering ) it's written in the notes : "Steve Coleman plays selmer saxophones and vandoren reeds"
But I don't know what are his saxophones' models... I'm not a sax player Razz

Joined : 03 Apr 2006 Posts : 254 Localisation : Paris

Well, as far as I know.

Steve is using a Selmer Reference saxophone with Vandoeren Reeds

Vandoren – Alto Saxophone V16 (size 3).

He has change from sax model during his career but Im sure he is using a reference model right now as we went to Selmer when In paris.

Dim.
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Joined : 09 Nov 2007 Posts : 2

Hi all,

Finally a forum ... Does anyone know Steve's sax setup .Do tell ..

Interested in the following particularly:

Mouthpiece
Ligature
Reeds (Brand / Strength)
Sax

There is a thread with the same subject (and answers) 6 steps below.

Maybe the following statement of Coleman is helpful for you too:

S.C.: I'll give you one example. One time I went to Stitt's hotel room and I had my saxophone with me. The guy just woke up. He had been drinking all this vodka so he had bad breath and everything. He said, "Give me your horn, boy!" And I thought, Oh, oh. Is this guy going to blow my horn? So he took my horn, which was a student horn with a student mouthpiece with a, what we call, stock reed, which is just any old reed. I was pretty poor, so it wasn't anything special. But he took my horn and started playing it. And he sounded exactly like Sonny Stitt. He started playing a song, he didn't play any of the original melody but I knew which song he was playing; you could hear the whole rhythm section and everything. My father used to say the guys sounded like they had a drum in the horn, they had such strong time. Everything was there, and this cat had just woken up. Just from that I learned so much, just sitting there listening to him. I said, “Okay, first of all it's not the horn.” You know, when he gave back the horn to me, it became nothing again. Piano, saxophone, synthesizer, take your choice, a guy who plays with me now, Grégoire Maret, plays harmonica. Harmonica! It's not the instrument. When people make excuses about the instrument, I'm like, you're just trippin', it has nothing to do with the instrument. It's all in the person. Second of all, you could hear the whole band when Stitt was playing. He was playing these melodic lines but you could hear everything. You could hear the chords, you could hear the rhythm, you could hear what the song was without him playing the melody. I mean he was really, really solid and really, really strong. And that had nothing to do with style. It's a certain assurance. That's where I imagine Bird was, where Bach was, all these cats, they were that solid. http://www.m-base.com/int_volz.html

Joined : 03 Apr 2006 Posts : 254 Localisation : Paris

hi,

I've merged the topics to make it easier.

Dim.
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Joined : 09 Nov 2007 Posts : 2

Wow ......that was really deep ..... Just how i imagined it would be. A brilliant player can pick up just about any horn and do wonders !

Thanks again !

Cap'n