 Legendary Sax Player
DON RENDELL | 
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Don Rendell is one of our national treasures, and should be ranked alongside the Cenotaph and cod in batter as a definition of our national consciousness. With a career that has taken in tours with Stan Kenton, Woody Herman and Billie Holiday, and collaborations with a host of Brits including Graham Bond, Ian Carr and Barbara Thompson, he is, at 78 years young, a self-effacing epitome of the genuine artist - still as eager to learn as he is to teach, still encouraging to his fellow artists, still fresh with the glow of the permanent child to whom the brashest honesty is the only policy."You can’t play what people want, man," he told me with moist vociferousness, "you have to do your own thing and be honest about it; then maybe they’ll come around to your thing." Don does play what people want if what you want is the spectacle of 60 years of experience brought to bear on a humble set of chord changes. He does play what people want if you want to hear tenor, soprano, flute or clarinet as no-one else can play them, talking a musical language as old as it is still new, as articulate as it is persuasive. When Don’s playing you hear it all, a whiff of Lester Young, a whimsical tip-of-the-hat to Bird, and more than a few stern lessons to any young pretenders. His flute might get way-out but never unmelodic. His soprano might stretch your brain a little, but it is always steeped in a sense of what sounds right and what says the most, often in the notes he leaves out. Don is as hard-edged and challenging as ever. His trademark up-front, in-your-face sound, particularly on tenor sax, is still allied to an harmonic sense that years have made yet more subtly creative.
Jazz isn’t about running the changes faster than your commercial competitors. Jazz is about those split-second choices made in your inner ear; the timing of the perfect joke; playing Shakespeare to a rhythm section; painting with sounds on the temporal plane. © Richard Russell 2004  
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