About
Rickey Woodard tears through nineteen extraordinary choruses of tenor saxophone on the title track of his 1992 live album The Tokyo Express, one of the most extended and exciting solos on record. At approximately 246 BPM over the 12-bar blues in F, his playing draws on the full depth of the blues tradition, from honking rhythm-and-blues textures to sophisticated bebop chromaticism, each chorus adding another layer to a solo of remarkable sustained invention. As the first of three soloists, his nineteen-chorus marathon establishes the track as the album's climactic performance, the high-speed tempo suggesting the velocity of the bullet train for which the composition is named.
Rickey Woodard was 41 to 42 years old at the time.
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