Rhett Bender performs on the sax at the 2019 Chengdu China International Youth Music Festival with the German cello quartet, Die Vier EvangCellisten.

Rhett Bender started playing the violin at age 9, later moving on to the tuba and euphonium. So how did he become an internationally renowned, award-winning saxophone soloist, clinician and presenter of master classes?

Well, besides practice, practice, practice, there was his discovery in the eighth grade of an unused, dusty tenor sax in the band room closet.

“The band director let me take it home and give it a try,” Bender said. “It was love at first sight.”

More about that later.

Bender, 54, divides his time between Ashland and Bend. He is a professor of music and saxophonist artist-in-residence at Southern Oregon University, where he teaches saxophone, music theory and chamber music.

A saxophonist for the Rogue Valley Symphony, he also has played sax for the Britt Festival Symphony Orchestra and is associated with numerous other ensembles as a founding member, performer or artistic director. In his free time, he enjoys biking, hiking and skiing.

But how did that young violinist discover the joy of sax?

Wanted: tuba player

When he first joined the band as a seventh-grader, there was no place for the violin. The director assigned him the tuba — because the director needed a tuba player.

“The transition to tuba was very difficult for me,” Bender said. “I did not read bass clef and I just didn’t understand the way the tuba worked. I was moved to the euphonium, but that wasn’t any more successful.”

When he took that dusty tenor sax home from school, he discovered it was a lot of fun to play. And he was back to reading treble clef.

“I’ve always felt like I learned to play the saxophone over that weekend, because I loved it so much. I couldn’t put it down.”

By the 10th grade, he was winning sax competitions.

Truth be told, playing the violin was never a grand passion of his. But mothers can be persuasive.

“When I was in fourth grade, my mom signed me up for violin and school orchestra,” he said. “Band wasn’t available then for students that young.”

He really wanted to play the guitar, like Johnny Cash.

“But the violin had strings, so I went along with it,” he said. “When I was in seventh grade, we moved to a smaller farm community that did not have an orchestra, and that was my chance to learn a band instrument.”

Sioux City born

He was born in Sioux City, Iowa. His father was on active duty in the Army, so the family moved around a lot, mostly in the South and Midwest.

Bender attended the University of Nebraska, earned a bachelor’s degree from Iowa State University, and a master’s degree and doctorate of musical arts from the University of Georgia.

His interest in ensemble performance led him to co-found the Globe Saxophone Quartet with colleagues in graduate school at the University of Georgia.

“We remain friends and still perform together, but not as frequently as we used to. We occasionally spend a week in residence or touring.”

He met his wife, Amy, after moving to Ashland in 1996.

“She was a stage manager for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and I was an on-stage musician for ‘As You Like It’,” he said.

He founded Mazama Saxophones in the Rogue Valley, performing and mentoring students by playing alongside them.

“I now have a great group of saxophone students who are able to create their own quartets,” he said. “Rather than playing with them, I coach them. Mazama exists now with friends and former students.”

He is most proud of the Siskiyou Saxophone Orchestra, a large ensemble he created soon after he arrived at SOU.

“We allow as many saxophone players in the ensemble that want to play,” he said. “We’ve had 12 to 20 saxophones at times.”

This coming school year, he’s shooting for more than 20 and encourages community sax players to join. Interested community musicians can contact him at bender@sou.edu.

Although the sax doesn’t get a lot of work in a symphony orchestra, there are pieces in which Bender gets to shine.

One of his favorites is the hauntingly beautiful and poignant saxophone solo in “The Old Castle” from “Pictures at an Exhibition,” which he will be playing under maestro Martin Majkut’s baton next April as part of the 2023-24 RVS concert season.

Another favorite is Milhaud’s “La Creation du Monde,” which he played with the RVS in 2022 and performed again Aug. 11 with the Sunriver Music Festival Orchestra in Bend.

China bound

Bender began traveling to China in 2003 and took a sabbatical, teaching a semester at the Sichuan Conservatory in 2005.

“In China there is an amazing saxophone community, the largest in the world,” he said. “I’ve made friends with many saxophone teachers in many parts of China, and have taken five groups of SOU students to China on concert tours.”

Three students returned on their own to teach there.

“One student, Erin Luca, has taught there for over 10 years and is now teaching at a music school in Beijing,” he said.

One of those trips to China resulted in the formation of JitZax, a sax-guitar duo with classical guitarist Wenjun Qi, whom he met there.

“She was my translator for a master class,” Bender said. “I recruited her to do a BA at SOU, and she finished a degree in classical guitar with our teacher at that time, David Rogers.”

She went on to finish a doctorate at USC, returning to Ashland for a few years.

“That’s when we started our duo,” he said. “It was all about developing our own repertoire. We commissioned composers to write music for us and we both created arrangements of music we liked.

“After we performed a concert tour in Croatia and then in China, Wenjun moved back to Los Angeles, and we haven’t performed much since then.”

And ‘Yakety Yak’

The saxophone is an expressive instrument, with the ability to create a variety of moods — from sultry and sexy in a ballad, to vibrant and soulful in a jazz riff, to playful and droll in a tune like “Yakety Yak.”

Early on, Bender discovered the silly side of the instrument.

“I just loved learning how to make my saxophone laugh,” he said.

And then there was the time he played the sax as he was skiing down Mt. Bachelor near Bend. A friend, Nick Jacques, a high school band director in Carson City, Nevada, talked him into it.

“He is a fantastic skier and saxophonist,” Bender said. “His students challenged him to ski and play saxophone at the same time.”

Jacques decided to take up the challenge, in part to inspire his students to practice during pandemic lockdowns. Asked to join the fun, Bender agreed.

Bender skied alongside his friend, recording Jacques playing the school fight song.

But Bender couldn’t resist making his own downhill run, performing Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise” and other tunes on his alto sax.

“Skiers cheered and stopped to listen,” he said.

When Adolphe Sax invented his eponymous instrument a century and a half ago, he probably didn’t envision the ski slope as a likely venue.

(Cue laughing sax.)