Nervous Man Nervous

"When you want to create excitement, you repeat a phrase over and over and over," he explains, "but as you repeat this phrase, there's different ways: Sometimes you use vibrato, sometimes you don't. When you use a real fast vibrato, then the note has a different connotation, all right? Certain low notes bring out certain characteristics in a person, high notes bring out other characteristics. A-flat is probably the best key, because you can get your low notes, you've got the middle range, then you go up another octave or two and you've got the whole range of the saxophone. A-flat has the groove, it brings out the darker side.

"But the reason I'll play high notes is because I'll watch people's clothes, the way they dress, their shoes. If I see a person in a $200 suit, I'm not gonna scream and holler, I'll play it lower -- to meet their characteristics, to make that cat groovy. Then if I get somebody dressed a bit different, then bam! I throw in high notes and low notes, and it creates excitement with them, and the other people sitting around them who maybe won't even move, they get this radiation and they begin to move. So you get everybody in the house movin' -- this is what you have to do. People don't know what it is, but when they hear it, they know. To me, it's soul."

Check out Jim Dawson's book Nervous Man Nervous: Big Jay McNeely and the Rise of the Honking Sax, 1994, Big Nickel Publications, Milford, NH.