Reedmen (clockwise from left): Pete Ross, Tony Barba, Clay Lyons and Al Falashi.
If you’ve listened to 22, A Million, the new Bon Iver album released Sept. 30, you may have noticed that there’s a lot of saxophone on it. Not so much blistering sax solos or melodic flourishes, but dense layers of subtle atmosphere, much of it heavily processed, which contribute to the overall dreamy tone of the album.
The 12-piece sax choir Bon Iver mastermind Justin Vernon assembled for the project — collectively dubbed the Sad Sax of Shit — included four Madtown reedmen: Tony Barba of Youngblood Brass Band; Al Falaschi of Phat Phunktion; Pete Ross of the Jimmys; and Clay Lyons, a Madison native now jazzing it up on the East Coast.
Saxophone is nothing new for Bon Iver. Sax ace Michael Lewis has long been part of Vernon’s inner circle. But 12 of ’em? Once the idea of a full-blown sax choir popped into Vernon’s head, it became clear that the circle would have to expand.
When you achieve Vernon’s level of success, you can get nearly anybody you want to play on your album. He could have summoned the hottest saxophonists in New York to his studios. But Vernon is the kind of guy who likes to keep it local. So he set Lewis and another saxophonist friend, Matt Douglas, to the task of gathering a dozen sax players from the upper Midwest. Douglas, it turned out, was a college classmate of Barba’s, so he tapped into Barba’s Madison sax network. Lewis, meanwhile, mainly worked his Twin Cities connections. Thus the Sad Sax of Shit were born.
In September 2015 the four Madison musicians loaded a car up with a mess of saxes, from sopranos to tenors (there was no room for a baritone, so they just brought their bari mouthpieces), and headed northwest. The crew spent five days at April Base, a former veterinary clinic in Fall Creek, outside Eau Claire, which serves as both Vernon’s recording studio and his home.
Falaschi says the process was quite different from most sax-for-hire recording gigs, where players come in and are dismissed after they play their parts. “They [Vernon and arranger Rob Moose] just started putting charts down and we’d play through it, and Justin and Rob would go off and listen to things, chop things up,” Falaschi says. “Then they’d come back and say, okay we like this, we don’t like that, let’s change this part.... It was really cool to watch him work, just the amount of time they were spending on this thing.”
Falaschi was also impressed by how, well, normal Vernon was. No superstar bullshit. “He opened up his house to us, he was hanging out with us...he’s just a good old Wisconsin kid like I would have been friends with in college. Super laid-back.”
The final proof of Vernon’s regular ol’ Cheesehead nature came toward the end of the five-day stretch, when the Packers were scheduled to take on the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday Night Football. The Sad Sax wanted to shut down recording to watch the game. To their delight, Vernon was totally on board. “We didn’t know if he was a Packers or Vikings fan, since Eau Claire is so close to Minneapolis,” Falaschi says. “But when he showed up with his Packers shirt on, we were like, ‘Yes!’”
