[jdietrich]

>Tone isn't that important in jazz. Hence, the importance of the saxophone, an instrument rightly reviled in classical music for mostly sounding awful.

Jazz doesn't have a fixed ideal of timbre. The saxophone has immense timbral versatility and expressiveness, which is integral to it's role in jazz. The saxophone emphasises every nuance of breathing and embouchure. The smoother, sweeter-sounding clarinet disappeared from jazz with the dawn of bebop. The clarinet will still do those silky legato runs, it's only marginally more difficult to finger, but it just doesn't speak with the same expressiveness. A similar argument could be made about the use of brass mutes, especially plungers - they don't make a particularly pretty sound, but they're tremendously expressive.

The obvious example here would be Albert Ayler, whose playing is either exquisitely expressive or grotesquely ugly depending on your perspective. Compare his tone with Ben Webster or Johnny Hodges and you'll see my point.

Mildly cantankerous sidebar: if classical musicians really cared about quality of tone, they would have adopted the cornet a century ago. British brass bands rightly revile the trumpet as the vulgar, shrill cousin of the cornet.

[beat]

I agree with all of this. Saxophone is a highly expressive instrument... just not a pretty one. And I'm a huge Albert Ayler fan (which also gets back to melodic ideals... Ayler's great compositions are great in part because they're such simple, euphonic Circle-of-Fifths things, like folk music or gospel. To jazz nerds, Ayler is difficult. To non-nerds, Ayler is much easier to understand than most jazz.)