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Lenny Pickett Is a Sax Machine: The SNL musical director and longtime session player shares the stories behind ten of his most cherished riffs, from Elton John to Taylor Swift

The SNL musical director and longtime session player shares the stories behind ten of his most cherished riffs.

If you’remaking an annual pie chart to determine which Saturday Night Live cast members receive the most screen time each season, you may as well add Lenny Pickett to the mix. Prior to being hired by SNL in 1985, he was an in-demand session musician whose band, Tower of Power, were the go-to cats for adding a horn section to any record. I have a solo on “The Way You Do the Things You Do.” But this ended up being perhaps the biggest session of my career, because I met G. E. Smith, who became the guitar player and band leader at Saturday Night Live a year later.

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