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My mom’s gardener found it in the trash. She wasn’t entirely clear about details like what trash and from which side of the border it came, but best not to look a gift horse in the mouth. And that’s what it was – a gift, meant to hang it on a wall in her Julian home, or to possibly be fashioned into a planter or a bird house: a vintage saxophone, silver, in a well-traveled case. She passed it on to me.
“It says Wurlitzer on it,” she’d said. “It’s got Wurlitzer written in this gorgeous scroll-work all over it.” I cracked open the case and saw, lying in repose as if a decedent in a plush-lined casket a memento from another century. It was a bona fide rarity called a C melody sax. And now for the first time in maybe 25 years I once again owned a saxophone.
I started playing music around the age of 10 in elementary school band class. I’d wanted to play the Sousaphone but the sales guy at Ozzie’s Music in La Mesa talked my parents into renting an alto saxophone. By 1963 I was playing my alto in a surf rock-inspired band cobbled together for an elementary school talent show. Sax was king, but its reign was temporary. That next fall when we re-adjourned at Horace Mann Junior High the British Invasion had sent saxophones to the scrap heap. If you didn’t play, or at least own an electric guitar you were nobody.
I still played but I disdained sax for the next three years until I chanced to meet up with a skinny kid who sported a noticeable ‘fro and (even then) very hip dark glasses that made him look kind of like a bug. His name was Hollis Gentry, and from day one it was clear that he knew way more about alto sax than I’d ever dreamed.
The C melody saxophone is halfway between an alto and a tenor in size. It is an instrument I’d always coveted but had never owned; I’d heard that Charlie Parker, role model to all saxists blew one, alternating with his more familiar alto. Cannonball Adderley was heir apparent to Parker and was given the man’s horns following his death. Hollis Gentry was heir apparent to Adderley; he told me that the great man once allowed him to sit in a room, alone, with Parker’s C melody.
I sent local tenor saxist Ian Tordella an email immediately. His reply was somewhat discouraging: “Nice!” he wrote back. “C melody is a hard nut to crack, though. No one makes them any more and nobody makes the reeds or mouthpieces for them. Only a handful of guys in the world still play them.” That handful included names like Joe Lovano, Edward Jordan, Dave Pietro, James Carter, and Anthony Braxton.
Here in town, Johnny Ciampoli owns one that I know of but I don’t think he blows it much at gigs.
C melody saxophones are otherwise called the neglected children of the sax family. Their golden era was during the 1920s. Buescher, Conn, King, Martin and Selmer all built C melodies along with sopranos, altos, tenors, and baritone saxophones. They all stopped making the C melody after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
As its name suggests the C melody sax is in the key of C. Unlike all other saxophones, it is a non-transposition instrument. If you play an alto or bari, both in the key of E flat, you know about the special mental pain of having to transpose each note 3 semitones lower and adding three sharps or taking out three flats from the key the song is in. Hoy vey! Tenor and soprano sax, both in B flat, are a little easier. One need play each note two semitones higher and add two sharps. No such trouble with a C melody, though. It comes ready-made in concert pitch.
My C melody is a true two-tone meaning the body is silvery with a gold glow emanating from inside the bell. It has the Wurlitzer imprint but was likely made by Martin or Buescher in Elkhart Indiana. Not an uncommon occurrence - a handful of the big manufacturers stamped out instruments anonymously for sale by other name brands. Mine is a coveted Low Pitch model (C melodies also come as High Pitch, suitable for converting into lamps or planters) and its serial number, 129397 indicates it was made around 1923.
I sanitized the hard rubber mouthpiece, strapped on a bass clarinet reed (the only type that fits the antique mouthpiece) and blew my first notes in decades: warm and woody. I ran the scale. I triggered the octave key – sweet! When I stopped I noticed that Maggie the Wonder-Dog had left the room.
In the early 1970s Crawford High, the next stop after Horace Mann for most of us still had the de rigueur marching band for football games and such but they also had a cutting edge jazz workshop taught by a visionary named Dennis Foster. He had the good sense to switch me to over to baritone sax, a monstrous horn with tones not unlike a Sousaphone. Foster saw that I was big enough to handle the king-sized horn and knew instinctively perhaps that I would never be a soloist. The bottom end was a good place to park my lagging skills.
For the next three years of high school I sat to the left of Hollis Gentry, mesmerized by his Coltrane-level playing and my good fortune at being included in such a group to the extent that I sometimes would go slack-jawed and forget to play and get an ass-chewing from Foster.
In that same jazz class was bassist Gunnar Biggs and a fluid drummer named Hartwell “Skipper” Raggsdale, the undertaker’s son who wore a different suit and tie to class every day of the week. Nathan East (he would eventually join the bands of both Eric Clapton and Phil Collins) also played bass, and a young and gifted Carl Evans joined us on piano. Foster bussed all 27 or 30 of us in the big band up and down the coast. We kicked ass at college jazz festivals. Crawford awarded band letterman jackets. I still have mine.
But the gigging off campus and away from the structured classroom was where the real musical heavy lifting was taking place. I invited Hollis and Nathan to jam in my garage. As such they were the first African-American kids to penetrate the invisible racial curtain of our all-white mostly Protestant La Mesa neighborhood. You had to come up Malcolm Drive to get to our house. Hollis, always the teacher, re-named it Malcolm X Drive.
In turn, I sat in once at Skipper Raggsdale’s where similar musical workouts were going on in his family garage. I didn’t go back because I lacked chops. Instead, I went off to play sax in high school rock-and-horn band clones of the Chicago Transit Authority that always featured a guitar player with an amp stack turned so loud as to obliterate everything. Were we ever in tune? Who would know?
But Hollis and company kept at it, the modern jazz thing. Gentry, East, and Raggsdale had a funk jazz band they called Power in high school which was sort of a training ground for things to come; it got them attention from heavy hitters like Barry White. White planned to have them out on tour but he died, suddenly. Power dissolved and in its wake, Gentry and Evans would eventually form a band called Fattburger - less traditional, more smooth - with Mark Hunter, Steve Laury, and Kevin Koch. This band would gain national fame. Gentry left Fattburger after their first album (he would remain an honorary member) to form Neon and tour as a hired gun behind Al Jarreau, Larry Carlton, Stanley Clarke, Joe Sample, and more.
Fattburger by the way is still very much in business with Koch, Hunter and Tommy Aros, Mark Evans, and Allan Philips. Gentry died in the fall of 2006; Evans followed him two years later.
It could be said (and there are scores who may take issue with this - the list of locals who jammed with Gentry is prodigious and distinctions overlap) that both the Fattburger band and its youthful predecessor Power had their roots in the formative years in band class at Will C. Crawford high school. But they got honed to a perfection of the likes we may not see again here in garages and living rooms in Southeast San Diego. These are things I think about now as sit in my house and run the scales on my C melody in hopes of getting back whatever chops I had. Or maybe some new ones.
My mom’s gardener found it in the trash. She wasn’t entirely clear about details like what trash and from which side of the border it came, but best not to look a gift horse in the mouth. And that’s what it was – a gift, meant to hang it on a wall in her Julian home, or to possibly be fashioned into a planter or a bird house: a vintage saxophone, silver, in a well-traveled case. She passed it on to me.
“It says Wurlitzer on it,” she’d said. “It’s got Wurlitzer written in this gorgeous scroll-work all over it.” I cracked open the case and saw, lying in repose as if a decedent in a plush-lined casket a memento from another century. It was a bona fide rarity called a C melody sax. And now for the first time in maybe 25 years I once again owned a saxophone.
I started playing music around the age of 10 in elementary school band class. I’d wanted to play the Sousaphone but the sales guy at Ozzie’s Music in La Mesa talked my parents into renting an alto saxophone. By 1963 I was playing my alto in a surf rock-inspired band cobbled together for an elementary school talent show. Sax was king, but its reign was temporary. That next fall when we re-adjourned at Horace Mann Junior High the British Invasion had sent saxophones to the scrap heap. If you didn’t play, or at least own an electric guitar you were nobody.
I still played but I disdained sax for the next three years until I chanced to meet up with a skinny kid who sported a noticeable ‘fro and (even then) very hip dark glasses that made him look kind of like a bug. His name was Hollis Gentry, and from day one it was clear that he knew way more about alto sax than I’d ever dreamed.
The C melody saxophone is halfway between an alto and a tenor in size. It is an instrument I’d always coveted but had never owned; I’d heard that Charlie Parker, role model to all saxists blew one, alternating with his more familiar alto. Cannonball Adderley was heir apparent to Parker and was given the man’s horns following his death. Hollis Gentry was heir apparent to Adderley; he told me that the great man once allowed him to sit in a room, alone, with Parker’s C melody.
I sent local tenor saxist Ian Tordella an email immediately. His reply was somewhat discouraging: “Nice!” he wrote back. “C melody is a hard nut to crack, though. No one makes them any more and nobody makes the reeds or mouthpieces for them. Only a handful of guys in the world still play them.” That handful included names like Joe Lovano, Edward Jordan, Dave Pietro, James Carter, and Anthony Braxton.
Here in town, Johnny Ciampoli owns one that I know of but I don’t think he blows it much at gigs.
C melody saxophones are otherwise called the neglected children of the sax family. Their golden era was during the 1920s. Buescher, Conn, King, Martin and Selmer all built C melodies along with sopranos, altos, tenors, and baritone saxophones. They all stopped making the C melody after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
As its name suggests the C melody sax is in the key of C. Unlike all other saxophones, it is a non-transposition instrument. If you play an alto or bari, both in the key of E flat, you know about the special mental pain of having to transpose each note 3 semitones lower and adding three sharps or taking out three flats from the key the song is in. Hoy vey! Tenor and soprano sax, both in B flat, are a little easier. One need play each note two semitones higher and add two sharps. No such trouble with a C melody, though. It comes ready-made in concert pitch.
My C melody is a true two-tone meaning the body is silvery with a gold glow emanating from inside the bell. It has the Wurlitzer imprint but was likely made by Martin or Buescher in Elkhart Indiana. Not an uncommon occurrence - a handful of the big manufacturers stamped out instruments anonymously for sale by other name brands. Mine is a coveted Low Pitch model (C melodies also come as High Pitch, suitable for converting into lamps or planters) and its serial number, 129397 indicates it was made around 1923.
I sanitized the hard rubber mouthpiece, strapped on a bass clarinet reed (the only type that fits the antique mouthpiece) and blew my first notes in decades: warm and woody. I ran the scale. I triggered the octave key – sweet! When I stopped I noticed that Maggie the Wonder-Dog had left the room.
In the early 1970s Crawford High, the next stop after Horace Mann for most of us still had the de rigueur marching band for football games and such but they also had a cutting edge jazz workshop taught by a visionary named Dennis Foster. He had the good sense to switch me to over to baritone sax, a monstrous horn with tones not unlike a Sousaphone. Foster saw that I was big enough to handle the king-sized horn and knew instinctively perhaps that I would never be a soloist. The bottom end was a good place to park my lagging skills.
For the next three years of high school I sat to the left of Hollis Gentry, mesmerized by his Coltrane-level playing and my good fortune at being included in such a group to the extent that I sometimes would go slack-jawed and forget to play and get an ass-chewing from Foster.
In that same jazz class was bassist Gunnar Biggs and a fluid drummer named Hartwell “Skipper” Raggsdale, the undertaker’s son who wore a different suit and tie to class every day of the week. Nathan East (he would eventually join the bands of both Eric Clapton and Phil Collins) also played bass, and a young and gifted Carl Evans joined us on piano. Foster bussed all 27 or 30 of us in the big band up and down the coast. We kicked ass at college jazz festivals. Crawford awarded band letterman jackets. I still have mine.
But the gigging off campus and away from the structured classroom was where the real musical heavy lifting was taking place. I invited Hollis and Nathan to jam in my garage. As such they were the first African-American kids to penetrate the invisible racial curtain of our all-white mostly Protestant La Mesa neighborhood. You had to come up Malcolm Drive to get to our house. Hollis, always the teacher, re-named it Malcolm X Drive.
In turn, I sat in once at Skipper Raggsdale’s where similar musical workouts were going on in his family garage. I didn’t go back because I lacked chops. Instead, I went off to play sax in high school rock-and-horn band clones of the Chicago Transit Authority that always featured a guitar player with an amp stack turned so loud as to obliterate everything. Were we ever in tune? Who would know?
But Hollis and company kept at it, the modern jazz thing. Gentry, East, and Raggsdale had a funk jazz band they called Power in high school which was sort of a training ground for things to come; it got them attention from heavy hitters like Barry White. White planned to have them out on tour but he died, suddenly. Power dissolved and in its wake, Gentry and Evans would eventually form a band called Fattburger - less traditional, more smooth - with Mark Hunter, Steve Laury, and Kevin Koch. This band would gain national fame. Gentry left Fattburger after their first album (he would remain an honorary member) to form Neon and tour as a hired gun behind Al Jarreau, Larry Carlton, Stanley Clarke, Joe Sample, and more.
Fattburger by the way is still very much in business with Koch, Hunter and Tommy Aros, Mark Evans, and Allan Philips. Gentry died in the fall of 2006; Evans followed him two years later.
It could be said (and there are scores who may take issue with this - the list of locals who jammed with Gentry is prodigious and distinctions overlap) that both the Fattburger band and its youthful predecessor Power had their roots in the formative years in band class at Will C. Crawford high school. But they got honed to a perfection of the likes we may not see again here in garages and living rooms in Southeast San Diego. These are things I think about now as sit in my house and run the scales on my C melody in hopes of getting back whatever chops I had. Or maybe some new ones.