Can I get a horn section with that?
In rock music there is not much call for horn sections. It’s one of those things, either you need them or not. The Who toyed with horns from time to time but that was easy as bass player John Entwistle played horns. Kind of an “in house” thing.
Most bands would stay away from horns just from a musical perspective. A notable exception to that is Pink Floyd, there is usually a saxophone hiding somewhere with Floyd.
So if you are going to play rock and have horns, you may as well go for it.
Chicago certainly did.
“Saturday in the Park” from the 1972 release Chicago V reached number 3 on the charts and was used by the band as their opener for many years. It’s still a radio favorite today.
The blending of jazz, pop, rock with a bit of progressive rock thrown in from time to time has lead to one of the most successful bands in music history selling over 120 million albums.
This is such a cool song. It’s all but impossible to not love it. Robert Lamm’s sweet lead vocal, (thanks Ruby for the heads up! My bad…), joined by Peter Cetera on the chorus and call backs work together well. Adding the horn section fills up this little corner of the world as they tell about a summer afternoon in the park with all the characters one might expect to find there, the children, the ice cream man and a guy playing guitar.
Some nice imagery here.
“Saturday in the Park” is one of those songs that will never go away and for once, that’s a good thing.
Categories: Album Tracks
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March 6th, 2010 at 9:58 pm
That’s Robert Lamm on piano and lead vocals, not Terry Kath. Terry is only visible a couple of times on this video playing guitar. The video from Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve 1974-75 of Terry and Peter singing “Dialogue” live is another great performance by Chicago and Terry sounds awesome.
March 8th, 2010 at 9:22 pm
Thanks for the correction. I had never seen Kath play piano… and it did strike me as odd, so I should have dug a bit deeper.
I am appropriately humbled.
Pete
March 17th, 2010 at 8:23 am
I never thought much about horns in rock bands,
that is, not until today.
“Saturday in the Park” is one place where it works very well
This is also one of those Saturday songs that makes you smile
and if this would have been one of the choices it would have made choosing easier
I started thinking about what else I’ve heard where I liked the “horns”
Santana almost immediately came to mind
Not many others do, maybe a whole topic for CheeseMetal?
Thanks Pete