We’ve all heard great guitar solos, or drum solos, even bass solos, but what other kind of awesome solos can you think of that aren’t of the norm?
My first example would be the great harmonica solo by Jon Popper in Blue’s Travelers song Hook.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRhJt3PLdUE
Any others? Saxophone? Harmonica? Cow Bell? Flute? As long as it’s not guitar, drums or keyboards, I wanna hear it.
INXS “Never Tear Us Apart” - a very short, 2 bar saxophone solo, but used to great effect as the climax of the song.
Oh, I was gonna chime in with the piano solo for “Aladdin Sane,” but you don’t mean musically unconventional so much as instrumentally unconventional (though sax & harmonica are pretty common, IMO)
Well, the classics would be:
The ocarina solo in “Wild Thing.” (The Troggs)
The bagpipes in “Long Way to the Top if You Wanna Rock and Roll” (AC/DC)
The spoon solo in “Spoonman” (Soundgard)
Anything with Jethro Tull’s flute
There’s gotta be a sitar one out there, but all the sitar songs that immediately come to mind don’t really have an improvised solo section. I’m sure I must be missing something obvious.
Phish has this weird thing where the drummer occasionally plays a “vacuum” solo.
I don’t know about awesome, but that kazoo in the Beach Boys “All Summer Long” is kinda weird.
I see that it’s probably a piccolo or a fife. But weird.
BJ Thomas’s version of “Hooked on a Feeling” has an electric sitar solo in the middle and another at the fadeout.
Queen’s “White Queen” (on “Queen II”) has a smokin’ sitar solo in the middle.
Starbuck’s “Moonlight Feels Right” has an awesome 30-second solo on vibes.
Righteous! Smokin’ solo!
Zal Yanovsky shreds a terrific gargle solo in the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Bald Headed Lena.
The middle of Peter and Gordon’s I Don’t Want To See You Again has an oboe duet that sounds to me like a seal show.
My favorite kazoo solos and/or flourishes occur in Frank Zappa’s You’re Probably Wondering Why I’m Here.
Joanie Sommers’ Johnny Get Angry has a wonderfully incongruous kazoo duet (?).
If you are talking about harmonica solos, it has to be “Whammer Jammer.”
The Bonzo Dog Band has plenty:
There’s the trouser press solo in “Trouser Press.”
The electric shirt collar (and other) in “Shirt.”
All sort of things in “Doctor Jazz.”
Then, of course, there’s Spike Jones…
And P.D.Q. Bach…
I’ve always really loved the English horn solo in the Doors’ “Wishful Sinful.”
Some early Marvin Gaye singles, including Hitch Hike, had flute solos.
The ones not mentioned that come to mind:
Vibraphones in the Violent Femme’s “Gone Daddy Gone”
Agogo bells (or something similar?) in LCD Soundsystem’s “Daft Punk is Playing at My House”
How about the “synth tuba” from the Alan Parsons Project’s “Pyramid”?
There is kind of a theremin solo in Oxygene 10 by Jean Michel Jarre.
Here’s a bizarre number where (starting at 1:12) Daniele Vidal harmonizes her voice over an electronic machine, to make it sound weirdly like a voice synthesizer.
An almost hypnotic effect
Queen, again: “Night at the Opera” has “Seaside Rendezvous,” which has a verse-long solo by Freddie and Roger (playing kazoos?). Roger sings so high it makes my nether regions ache.
I can only thnk of two times I’ve heard a duet of harmonizing saxophones, one of thme the classic bridge in Van Morrison’s "Into the Mystic’ . The other, deliciously, in Ibrahim Ferrer’s “Aquellos Ojos Verdes” (at 2:15)
Binary solo from FOTC’s “Robots”:
They were allegedly not even using instruments – it was apparently Freddie and Roger imitating instruments using only their voices.
Also, the “tap dancing” in that verse was the two of them tapping on the mixing desk with thimbles.