Liner Notes: Peace, Love, and Sax With Lidia Rodriguez

Dimming one’s light in the face of haters is not something Lidia Rodriguez knows how to do. Whenever she gets comments from guys about her size or gender, the baritone player is quick to clap back with a joke and prove them wrong. “When I’m playing my bari sax, I feel huge. I feel powerful. I feel seven feet tall. I feel like no one could tell me s**t. Like I feel so good about myself.”

Lidia Rodriguez is a musical force performing and recording across genre. She gets down playing cumbia with  La Misa Negra, rocks stages with electronic group Madame Gandhi, and even goes dumb while performing with the Golden State Warriors brass band, the Bay Blue Notes.

Growing up in Mudville a.k.a Stockton, and later attending San Jose State, Lidia says she is a product of public music education. Now, as an educator herself, teaching bilingual music lessons, Lidia is not only training the next generation of musicians but also nurturing students to be self compassionate and authentically themselves.

On this week’s Rightnowish, Lidia Rodriguez talks about the power of showing up as her full self (a queer and Latina saxophonist) in music spaces and her mission to spread the power of “peace, love and sax.”

Read the transcript

Below are lightly edited excerpts of my conversation with Lidia Rodriguez.

MEDINA-CADENA: Yeah, the baritone sax is like such a unique instrument. For people who don’t know, it’s the biggest of all the saxophones. It’s like… plays the lower notes and it’s actually the heaviest. So like, why were you called to the baritone saxophone? 

RODRIGUEZ: I can remember wanting to play it because I actually saw another female. She was playing bari sax while my sister was in a jazz band.  And I always thought, Wow, she just sounds so big. Her sound is just so amazing. I always wanted to sound really big. So that was my first inspiration. 

MEDINA-CADENA: Is that common within saxophone players to call the baritone, “bari?” I just think that’s such a cute nickname. 

RODRIGUEZ:  “Bari” sax is super common. And in high school, there was like actually a few of us, a few female bari sax players, and we call ourselves the ‘Bari Babes.’ Which I thought was super cute because it wasn’t very common to have female bari players, but in that one section of our city, of those high schools, it was pretty much only female bari sax players. 

I had never seen a male bari sax player in a high school until I started to go to other high schools, like competitions and stuff. So it was almost kind of a club of us until I started to see the real world and notice there’s not a lot of us out there, actually. 

RODRIGUEZ:  For me, what makes you a bari sax player or what makes you a tenor and alto player if you choose to specialize in one, is the instrument that makes you feel the happiest. It’s the one that you feel like you can produce the best sound, the most controlled sound, the biggest, and even control it as much to get the smallest sound possible. And I just had the biggest skill set in my bari sax.

MEDINA-CADENA: What it’s like to play for The Warriors and for a crowd like that?  

RODRIGUEZ:  Playing for The Warriors is just the funnest time! I actually broke my neck strap, the thing that holds your saxophone up around your neck. I was jumping around, playing my saxophone way too hard that I broke my neck strap twice. That’s how fun that gig is. Like, they let us jump, yell. They can we can literally yell “warriorsssss” like, as loud as we want to and it’s just the most beautiful energy. They have us playing Mac Dre. We play E-40. Like they have a really lovely repertoire that they give to us. 

MEDINA-CADENA: Outside of playing and recording and collaborating, you are teaching music as well to K through to 5th grade students. And I saw this like really sweet TikTok video you made and the caption said, “When you become the queer androgynous Latina teacher you needed as a kid,” and then like, you’re in the background just like rocking and like your curls are just like, shaking. Can you say more about this?  

RODRIGUEZ:  Yeah, so it was like a day where I was like, wow, you really have to take a step back and realize what you’re actually giving to the kids besides music, you know? One of the first classes I taught, I remember I went around in the name game was like, What’s your first name? And what is something you like about yourself? And I don’t I don’t actually remember anyone ever asking me that when I was little, “What’s something you love about yourself that you just, like, really dig? 

So what I love about myself is I love that I am very kind and I love my big, messy hair.  And then it’s kinda the way I teach, and kind of just give that positivity everywhere else. like once you grow that seed of self esteem, they’ll get a branch, and then later on, they’ll actually have a full tree of self-esteem instead of adults constantly cutting them down. And I feel like for me, I just want to have a whole, you know,  generation of trees because I’ve been teaching since 2016.

MEDINA-CADENA: What message are you communicating through the music you’re performing? 

RODRIGUEZ:  There is not a lot of bari sax players so I feel even more special and rare that I’m a female bari sax player. So that in itself gives me a lot of power and I feel like that’s what I like to exude when I’m playing. That’s the message is the power of being yourself so genuinely that it’s almost an act of revolution.

Rightnowish is an arts and culture podcast produced at KQED. Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts or click the play button at the top of this page and subscribe to the show on NPR One, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.

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