The Ghost of the Machine: Technological and Avant-Garde Mediations in Colin Stetson’s Saxophone Practice

While the alto and tenor saxophones have had a long and rich history in jazz and popular music practices, the bass saxophone is seldom heard in those contemporary music genres. This paper analyses the ways several successful Montreal experimental musicians shift the cultural status of the bass saxophone, a once obsolescent instrument, through iconoclastic remediations of popular music aesthetics. Specifically, this study focuses on the case of Colin Stetson – the most commercially successful example among these musicians – whose pieces for solo saxophone released on the emblematic experimental music label Constellation Records have gone from underground cult status to making the prestigious Canadian Polaris album-of-the-year prize’s short-list in 2011 and 2013, and being featured in the latest Oscar-winning feature 12 Years a Slave.

This paper analyzes aspects of Stetson’s use of extended playing techniques and innovative mobilization of simple recording technology in order to argue that they have allowed the saxophone to match the musical aesthetic of popular electric instruments. Through their combination of avant-garde jazz playing style with popular music composition structure, Stetson’s pieces go far beyond the traditional repertoire associated with the saxophone. They pay homage to, refashion, and expand such earlier musical aesthetics as minimal electronic music, early heavy-metal, and contemporary western art music. Through a field research-based analysis of Stetson’s practice in relation to the Montreal experimental music scene and its reception in local and international media, this paper argues that Stetson’s albums reaffirm the cultural relevance of the bass saxophone within contemporary independent and semi-mainstream music circles alike. Furthermore, this recontextualization of the bass saxophone within the vibrant contemporary Montreal independent music scene is analyzed in relation to anxieties – specifically at play in the neighbourhood in which Montreal ‘hipster’ culture flourishes – about larger issues of gentrification and retro-fetishism identified by Geoff Stahl and Simon Reynolds.