The Devil's Horn: The Story of the Saxophone, From Noisy Novelty to King of Cool

285 Pages·2005·2.63 MB·English

by  Michael Segell

Table of Contents
Title Page
INTRODUCTION
1. THE GHOST CHILD
2. ANARCHISTE DE DROITE
3. A PARISIAN IN AMERICA
4. A VIRTUOSO ON HORSEBACK
5. THE COLLECTORS
6. IT’S ALL ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS
7. THAT SOUL THING
8. THE NAKED LADY
9. DIABOLIQUE
10. PERSONAL SOUND
11 PROVOCATEUR
12. LEGIT
13 INSTRUMENT OF THE FUTURE
14. BODY AND SOUL
15. GABRIEL’S HORN
Also by Michael Segell
About the Author
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
Notes
Copyright Page
INTRODUCTION
“Wynton made me play tenor,” Branford Marsalis is saying as he sleepily jabs
a spoon at a cumulus of milk froth that tops his cappuccino. “I was playing alto
in Art Blakey’s band, and he says, ‘Man, you don’t play the alto. Listen to the
way you play. You never play in the upper register, you’re always down around
the bottom of the horn. The bottom of the alto is the top of the tenor, so you
should just play tenor.’”
He takes a sip and licks the froth from his lower lip, which is creased in the
middle and looks like the perfect home for a buzzing saxophone reed. “A couple
weeks go by. He’s starting a new band and asks me to help him find musicians.
He says, ‘I need a piano player,’ and I say, ‘Kenny Kirkland.’ ‘I need a
drummer,’ and I say, ‘Jeff Watts.’ He says, ‘I need a tenor player, who do you
know?’ I say, ‘I know a guy.’ He says, ‘Really? What’s his name?’ I say, ‘He
doesn’t have a tenor yet, but he’ll have one in two weeks.’ So that’s how I
started playing tenor, and he was totally right.”
We’re sitting in a Starbucks in New Rochelle, a cozy suburb of New York not
far from Branford’s home, where he lives with his wife, a teenage son, and a
toddler daughter. It’s late morning and he’s agreeably rolled out of bed, thrown
on a New Jersey Nets T-shirt, light red workout shorts, and a pair of hybrid golf
shoe/sneakers, and met me for coffee.
“It was like finally meeting the right woman,” says Branford, who told his
friends he would marry his wife, his second, after their first meeting. “The alto
was like a first love affair and soprano like a first marriage. Now playing tenor is
an extension of my personality. It’s up to me what I want to project—happiness,
sorrow, existential dread, whatever. It shows me all my limitations and strengths.
It’s really good at that. And for jazz music, nothing beats the depth and range of
the tenor. I can’t imagine songs like ‘Alabama’ by Coltrane, or the last
movement of A Love Supreme, or the second movement of Freedom Suite by
Sonny Rollins being played on alto.”
Branford played piano as a kid, but “it was a bitch to carry around a Fender
Rhodes” to the gigs he played with his R&B band. He learned the clarinet, but
couldn’t imagine a career for himself other than in an orchestra. At fifteen, he
talked his father into buying him an alto saxophone, a Yamaha student model
that he promptly disassembled. Why? “Why not?” he says. “I just wanted to
know how it worked.” Like everyone else in his brilliant family, he got good
fast, but the alto never felt totally right. “For one thing, Charlie Parker already
did everything one could do on the alto.” So he spent time mastering the
soprano, considered by many to be the most difficult of the saxophones, a
tutorial that culminated in a 1986 hit record, Romances for Saxophone. Like
many modern tenor players, he now routinely moves between the big and little
horns—both B-flat instruments—and rarely plays the alto.
“The soprano can come off like an operatic voice,” he says. “When I worked
on that record, all I listened to were singers—Kiri Te Kanawa, Kathleen Battle,
Maria Callas. It amazed me how much I could approximate how they sing. And
as I started working more on the instrument, I found I could make it sound like
an English horn, a clarinet, or an oboe. It’s real malleable that way.”
Branford’s wife, their little girl in tow, has dropped by to pick up his car, so I
tell him I’ll give him a ride home. He spots a saxophone case in the back of the
car; it contains my newly rented Armstrong student-model tenor. He has to see
it, obeying a superstition he says is too complicated to explain. He rigs up the
horn, plays a furious string of notes through the entire natural compass, and the
sax-o-phone, the voice of Adolphe Sax, booms across the parking lot, dodging
buses and SUVs and slipping around moms with strollers before dispersing into
the woods of a golf course across the highway. “This will do until you get your
own horn,” he pronounces.
A natural pedagogue—he is a Marsalis, after all—Bradford can’t resist giving
a beginner a little lesson. “Here’s what I want you to practice,” he says, tuning
the horn by pushing the mouthpiece a little farther onto the crook. He hands it to
me. “It’s a tonguing exercise. Set your metronome to 130, then articulate each
note three times before rising to the next on the last quarter note and pausing.
Then do the same with the next note. Go through all two and a half octaves, or
until your tongue just quits.”
I start with D and clumsily tongue my way up to the next octave. “Not bad,”
Branford says as he writes down his telephone number on a piece of paper. “Call
me if you have any questions.”

Thus ended my first lesson on the saxophone, the first of several tutorials that
would spontaneously break out as I explored the horn’s glorious and often
controversial history with some of its finest practitioners. Saxophonists, I’ve
learned, are a generous and agreeable lot, enormously sympathetic to a new
convert. Immediately, they know something compelling and personal about the
neophyte—namely, that he’s been seduced by a power he can’t quite understand
and yet is helpless to resist. They’re happy to help in any way they can.
Since meeting Branford, I’ve talked to hundreds of saxophone players—
brilliant young stylists such as Marcus Strickland, Vincent Herring, and Ron
Blake; middle-aged virtuosos such as Michael Brecker and Joe Lovano; and
emeritus lions such as Jimmy Heath and the late Illinois Jacquet. Almost every
one of them describes his virgin encounter with the horn as some kind of
epiphany, conversion, mystical event—or, more prosaically, a mugging. Not
long before he died, Benny Carter told me that the first time he played the
saxophone, at fourteen, he felt “extraordinary joy” and that every day since had
been a “religious experience.” David Murray, who grew up in the Pentecostal
Church, described his initial encounter as an experience not unlike that of being
“saved.” Sonny Rollins said that when his mother gave him his horn and he first
put it to his lips, “I got that buzz. After that, any time I practiced I was in heaven,
another place. It was more like it took me over.” Lee Konitz recalls the
transfixing golden sparkle of the horn set off against the dense purple velvet
lining of the case, and the narcotic smell—like that of Proust’s madeleine: “Ah,
the smell.” Claude Delangle remembers the feeling of being “invaded by a
virus” after first tracing with a small finger the keyboard’s beautiful, complex
architecture. Phil Woods can vividly picture his mother pulling the cased
instrument from its bedroom hiding place, as though it was a dirty family secret
that he was now old enough to understand, and his hands trembling as his fingers
magically assumed a perfect position on the sleek, sexy, serpentine vessel.
For me, it was a thunderbolt, a lightning strike that instantly and permanently
rearranged my brain chemistry. Not long before I met Branford, a friend of mine,
Ortley, strapped his Selmer Mark VI alto saxophone around my neck and
showed me where to rest my fingers and how to form my embouchure—the
recruitment of several dozen facial muscles that support the lips, tongue, and
teeth around the mouthpiece. I took a long breath and blew. The horn responded
with a rich, resonant, low E-flat. I blew again, extending the note—my first long
tone—and my whole body seemed to shape-shift into a musical instrument, my
cells breaking down into their component atoms and gluons and reconstructing
themselves with a unified mission: to produce a perfect tone. I noodled for
another five minutes, found a simple three-note melody, and repeated it, now
convinced that some long-dormant past-life musicianship had been unshackled.
Since that first long tone, I’ve been in the throes of an infatuation that grows
deeper day by day. The object of the only obsession that has exceeded this one is
now the mother of my children. Perhaps you’ve experienced the feeling: there’s
a primitive recognition, it’s all so deeply familiar. I know you, this is not new, we
go way back.
In the two years since my conversion, I’ve come a long way toward
understanding why Adolphe Sax’s extraordinary creation, the most recent
important musical instrument to have been invented, was so quickly embraced
by the world, why millions of players and listeners have so willingly submitted
to its spell—and why so many others, frightened by its diabolical charm, have
tried throughout its short history to malign or suppress it. After an innocent first
kiss—a perfect long tone, say—its mysterious energy envelops and overwhelms
you. You enter into some strange unwritten devotional contract, helplessly
announce your allegiance to the cult of Adolphe, and become a loyal advocate
for the voice of Sax.
You become, you could say, an instrument of the devil.
1. THE GHOST CHILD
He was known as Le petit Sax, le revenant (the ghost-child) to the citizens of
his village, Dinant, in Belgium. After one of his many nearly fatal accidents, his
mother lamented, “The child is doomed to suffer; he won’t live.” Almost before
he could walk, little Adolphe Sax, christened Antoine Joseph in 1814, was
fascinated with the alchemical magic performed every day in his father’s
workshop, where the most elemental materials were recombined into the finest
brass, which was in turn fashioned into an exquisite musical instrument.
Although Charles Joseph Sax, who had been appointed Belgium’s chief
instrument maker by William I of Orange, was eager to pass on his skills to his
firstborn son, agents of misfortune conspired relentlessly to remove the boy from
the land of the living. When he was two Adolphe fell down a flight of stairs,
smashed his head on a rock, and lay comatose for a week. A year later, toddling
around his father’s atelier, he mistook sulfate of zinc for milk, gulped it down,
and nearly expired. Subsequent poisonings involved white lead, copper oxide,
and arsenic. He swallowed a needle, burned himself severely on a stove, and was
badly scorched again by exploding gunpowder, which blew him across the
workshop floor. He was again rendered comatose by a heavy slate tile that
dislodged from a roof and landed on his head. When he was ten, a villager
happened to spot the drowning lad when, after falling into a river, he was
eddying, facedown and unconscious, in a whirlpool above a miller’s gate. The
villager just managed to pluck him from the water. Before he entered
adolescence, his head was scarred by the repeated blows, and one side of his
body was badly disfigured by burns.
But his misadventures proved instructive, hardening him for the nasty battles
that would plague him as he tried to launch an ingenious musical invention, a
serpentine horn whose provenance he secured by naming it after himself. From
the moment his lips first touched his saxophone prototype, Adolphe Sax would
face a juggernaut of slander, theft, litigation, forced bankruptcies, and attempts
on his life that tried to suppress his new sound, a sound never before heard in
nature, a sound that promised to change the timbre and soul of music wherever it
was played.
By 1842, the twenty-eight-year-old Adolphe Sax was widely recognized as one
of the world’s top acoustical craftsmen. Far more skilled and ambitious than his
brilliant father, he set out on a late-winter day from Brussels for Paris, then the
musical-instrument manufacturing center of the world. In addition to his
personal belongings, he carried with him an enormous brass horn, almost as tall
as he, that he had fabricated in his father’s workshop, where he had thrived after
surviving his calamitous childhood. It was the most recent creation of his already
remarkable career. At fifteen he had fabricated a clarinet and two flutes from
ivory, considered exquisite specimens by judges at the 1830 Brussels Industrial
Exposition. Before he was twenty he had created a new fingering system on the
soprano clarinet and reinvented the bass clarinet, transforming the unreliable and
mostly unplayable instrument into a regal, elegant woodwind that provided a
rich bottom to any instrumental configuration and, remarkably, played in tune.
The newly rehabilitated instrument had quickly been adopted as a standard
member of the woodwind group and its inventor acknowledged as an engineer of
great promise in the musical capitals of Europe.
Despite his success, Sax was feeling grossly maligned and unappreciated. For
several years the judges of the Belgian national exhibition had refused to grant
him the first prize for his innovations, reasoning that though the precocious
designer may have deserved them, were he to receive the exhibition’s highest
honors at such a young age, he would have nothing else to aspire to. The year
before, in 1841, Sax had prepared to submit for review his new bass horn, the as-
yet-unnamed saxophone, the first in a proposed family of seven that would
reconfigure the sonic organization of military and symphonic orchestras. After
glimpsing the instrument—a brass-and-reed hybrid that joined the body of an
ophicleide, a sinuous conical horn, with a clarinet-style mouthpiece—the first
wholly new one to emerge since the clarinet had been invented a hundred years
before, a jealous competitor apparently booted it across the floor, damaging it so
badly it was unfit for exhibition. Disappointed and disgusted, Sax had packed his
belongings, carefully wrapped up his mangled creation, and fled Brussels. When
he arrived in Paris he had thirty francs in his pocket.
It was the first of many attempts to suppress this intrusive latecomer, this
interloper, which, unlike wind instruments with ancient roots, could trace its
lineage only as far as the revolutionary design specifications of a visionary
acoustical scientist. Like every subsequent injunction over the next century
against the saxophone and its “carnal,” “voluptuous” sound—by heads of state,
local police, educators, symphonic conductors, film censors, and a host of other
moral arbiters, including the Vatican—it failed.