On September 12th, 2024 (the eve before the release of his album The Love it Took to Leave You), Colin Stetson took the stage at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Mostly known for his soundtrack work on films like Hereditary and The Menu, the avant-garde saxophonist also has a wealth of solo compositions that I had the delight of hearing performed live among a crowd of polite, mild-mannered ambient music enjoyers. But Stetson’s music is anything but mild-mannered — it’s an intense, all-consuming, whirlpool of sound, and being in a venue filled by his hypnotic melodies makes you feel like you’re about to fall into that whirlpool.
Stetson has a remarkable ability of making the saxophone sound nothing like a saxophone at all. His use of a technique called circular breathing (which I first learned about from his website while working on this article) crafts a relentless stream of sound that fills every corner of the concert hall and leaves an echo that hangs in the air. I can only imagine how Herculean of a task it is to produce constant sound from a woodwind instrument for upwards of six minutes. When watching him perform I could’ve sworn that he was playing over a backing track in order to achieve his unique sound live, but after looking into it recently I found that it really is just him and his saxophone on stage. Crazy! What a feat it is to be able to craft melodies that are so layered and complex on just a single instrument.
All of Colin Stetson’s work is full of visceral, multi-layered emotion, but during his performance in San Francisco he talked about these pieces so simply. After a rendition of his song “The Six”, which physically rattled the floor of the concert hall, he gets up to the microphone and says “that song was about revenge” before plunging into his next piece. But you could feel that it was about revenge, before he even said anything. There was a sense of animalistic urgency in the way that he played, which made you sense that white-hot anger of revenge so vividly. And despite the enormity and intensity of his songs, throughout the night he humbly used just a few words here and there to talk about the meaning behind them.
The haunting echo left by Stetson’s saxophone combined with the ebb and flow of the flickering spotlights in an otherwise dark, foggy room, crafted an atmosphere in the venue that felt almost cave-like. The sounds from the woodwind and the lights on the stage seemed to infinitely bounce off the walls of the concert hall and reflect off the faces of awe-struck audience members. This cave-like reverberation complemented his music perfectly — turning the Great American Music Hall into a cavern for an hour and a half really brings your attention to the howling, ghostly qualities of Stetson’s compositions.
Colin Stetson is also a very physical performer — his constant rocking back and forth as he plays offers an anchor amongst his chaotic, swirling melodies, and his deep inhales through his instrument almost become part of the songs themselves. It’s a testament to how much of a full-body effort his performance is, especially for pieces performed on the bass saxophone (an instrument which is roughly half the height of Stetson himself). The clacks of the saxophone keys also add a percussive element to the music, which made the sound feel even more multi-layered.
It amazes me to no end how one man on the saxophone can craft this type of all-consuming, beautifully haunting atmosphere and make a familiar instrument sound entirely unfamiliar. Colin Stetson is truly pushing the boundaries of the saxophone and the ambient music genre as a whole.
Review and photography by Anette Brecko