Maggie's Farm

Yeah there were some pretty sour clams in there, especially the first part. Eeesh. But as a saxophonist* I appreciate the effort various groups, often amateurish, put into this neglected (and still rather undeveloped) aspect of saxophone music, which is overall much closer to something Adolph Sax might've envisioned than where American Jazz and popular music took his instrument.

It's one of those weird historical quirks, that an instrument created by a French-speaking Belgian and aimed initially at French / European military band music, and secondarily at orchestral music, became such a quintessentially American horn.

Oh yeah:

* It's "Saxophone". You let an extra "a" malinger in the word.

I got to thinking about how tonally flexible the saxophone is. Think, say, Charlie Parker. Maceo Parker. Johnny Hodges.

Then listen to this .

That's an alto saxophone, sounding something like Adolph Sax himself might expect it to. Most the difference is in the mouthpiece. The old-school mouthpieces had giant round chambers with a very narrow tip opening; using one you feel like you're in the middle of sonic tone bubble. During the 20th Century players in dance bands wanted more volume, projection and focus, so the mouthpiece chambers shrank and the tip openings got wider so you could pump more air through them. Playing that kind of mouthpiece you get the impression you're hosing down the audience with your tone. In a good way.

This soloist gets a very nice tone, except one point where he plays a high note way above the staff, and exposes the dirty secret of orchestral alto saxophone: just about nobody can make it sound good way up in the altissimo register, whether the notes are in tune or not. Most horns are keyed up to F or F#; you use false-fingerings to get notes higher than that. Easily doable, but the freak register notes never sound pretty to my ears - unless you're squealing out some R&B lick with lots of growl in the tone. Then it sounds lovely!!

This soloist is apparently playing a Buescher "Aristocrat" alto saxophone, a model that Johnny Hodges played for a couple of decades; it's very popular with orchestral sax players because Sigurd Rascher played one for most of his career.