If I was to make an inventory of My Favorite Sounds in Dance Music.... high up would be the horn sounds in UK garage.
"Horns" - because they are nearly always done with synths. The timbre is obviously ersatz and the "action", in terms of playing, is not quite right.
But in this case, they are vastly preferable to the Real Thing. Imagine how awful it would be to have actual saxophonists or trumpeters playing on UK garage tracks!
Oh I know there's the odd example of real soloing and indeed the main one that springs to mind - the musky, languid sax on Groove Chronicles' "Stone Cold" - is great.
But generally the horns in UKG are completely synthetic and all the better for it.
It's one of the defining features of speed garage and 2step, right up there with the woody drum sounds and those xylo-bass percusso-riffs.
I think what I like about the sound is precisely the sophistication-on-the-cheap quality.
They also contribute to the sultry sexiness of the genre.
But because they are played on a keyboard, they have a particular function: parping vamps that propel the groove along, just like every other single musical element in the mix.
But what is he talking about, you are saying?
There's also a two-note horn vamp in their "It's My House (The Bashment Mix)", from about 48 seconds in.
Another example: the Steve Gurley remix of Baffled Republic's "Things Are Never" - again, just a micro-riff, kicking in about 1.31, Really just a kind of thickening agent to the hyper-syncopated stew.
In this immortally insane track by Stephen Emmanuel presents Colours, a single shrill note of horn - more a beep than a parp - punctuates the madness repeatedly. Jump in at about 47 seconds. And it's particularly clear from 1.50 when the track strips down.
Here in Echo Ltd 9's "Happy Times", there's more of a developed melodic role - starting at about 2.14 - but still mechanistic
Conversely, Dreem Teem's remix of Amira's "My Desire" is largely horn-free but then there's an odd little stunted solo at around 3.56
The Ramsey & Fen remix of Fabulous Baker Boys' "Oh Boy" has an almost-solo coming in at 3 minutes on the dot - and then 3.44, recurs with some slightly different vampige.
Sort of makes me think of an animatronic jazz band...
This Grant Nelson production starts a parpin' at 47 seconds... the horn is basically doing the same sort of job as the "organ" pulse
A modern example, ominously titled "Sax", does indeed deliver at cheesy solo of sorts at 4.30
Can't tell if that's a real horn or still the keyboard approach... A keyboard, I think.
Either way, yeuuch
See, what I like about this kind of thing is that it gestures at jazz but doesn't deliver it
"Jazz" in air quotes.
"Jazzy" is good in Nuum... actual jazz, not so much. The methodologies don't gel.
In all these UKG tunes, the jazziness is subordinated entirely to the groove function.
It's also almost always a chirpy, cheerful, extrovert sound. There's none of the blues aspect of saxophone, the sensual melancholy. It's a brisk, get-busy sort of feeling.
Another thing is the eerieness or just off-ness that occurs when an instrumental sound is played on a keyboard, rather than the sounding mechanism of whatever instrument it is meant to be: strings and horsehair with a violin, brass and fiddly little stops and fingertips with horns (not forgetting the embouchure of the blower).
With the UKG horns, the attack and decay of the sound is wrong. ("Envelope", is that the term?)
But this wrongness then becomes its own kind of rightness.
A similar thing happens with the Mellotron and the Chamberlin (its precursor instrument). Brief swatches of instrumental timbre - brass or woodwind or strings or whatever - are on loops of tape that are triggered by a keyboard. So you have a trumpet or a cello sound but they are played pianistically. Very much proto-sampler, except it's like a Fairlight that only has the preset, built-in timbres, it doesn't have the ability for the user to make new samples.
The classic example of this natural-sound-made-denatured, as heard in all sorts of dance music is vocal samples arrayed on a keyboard and played in a clearly not-what-a-mouth-and-lungs-would-do way
But the estrangement effect works just as well as with instruments that aren't made of flesh and sinew, the external instruments as it were.
See also that other hallmark of the nuum: pizzicato "string" parts.
Even more horny horn examples.
Actually this one, by Doolally, "Straight To The Heart", at 1.46, is different. It's much more like 2-Tone and the trombone sound in ska. With a bit of dubby reverb on it at points.
More in the classic UKG parptastic mode: Nu-Birth, "Anytime", from 2 minutes in.
In the Somore, a voice seems to be saying "blow your horn" - sampled from some classic American garage track, maybe?
See, I had been hoping that this was some unique UKG invention, but of course it turns out that the first to do the fake-sax are your American maestro progenitors, like Masters At Work
Okay, then, like always, the Americans start it.
But, like almost always, the Brits take it further.
That would apply to the vocal cut-ups, the hard-swung woodblock snares, too.
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And of course - American sourced, yet a UKG cornerstone, and saxy - there's this
That, I'm almost certain, is real saxophone - there's a lightness of touch to it, and inflection, that's entirely absent from UKG hornery,
Which is usually sort of stubby, is the word I would use to describe those parped toots.
It's real sax in "Gabriel" but I wonder if it is sampled or whether Roy Davis got someone in to play it.
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Started pondering the mystery of the UKG horn and what it connotes while watching this objectively poorly executed doc that is just about worth sitting through for the snippets of old footage...
