Shine on, Dick Parry

The brilliantly crafted sax lines by Dick Parry, who passed away at 83 this week, were rarely the first thing one noticed in a Pink Floyd song. But imagine the songs stripped of his saxophone and the incompleteness will reveal what he brought to them. In his aching solo on ‘Shine on, you crazy diamond’, written in memory of Syd Barrett, one can feel the instrument channelling the collective grief of the band. In ‘Us and Them’, the band’s anti-war masterpiece, the saxophone wails. It is interesting, therefore, to note that Parry was never officially a part of Pink Floyd: He was a session artiste whose talent transformed some of the greatest works of the rock giant. Raised in Suffolk, Parry was a 17-year-old playing the local music circuit when he met David Gilmour, later the lead guitarist of Pink Floyd. It would be the beginning of a lifelong friendship that would lead Parry to the band. When it comes to rock, it is usually the guitarists, the charismatic frontmen and the songwriters who are elevated to demigod status. The saxophone — often thought to belong in jazz clubs and to gloss pop — has had a somewhat uneasy relationship with the genre. Once central to its early rhythm-and-blues roots, it ceded ground to the electric guitar quite early. But even amid Gilmour’s riffs, Roger Waters’ words and Richard Wright’s keys, Parry’s saxophone held its own with a rare artistry.