Klarinet Archive - Posting 000100.txt from 1999/07

From: Ken Wolman <kwolman@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] sax trouble
Date: Sun, 4 Jul 1999 19:06:49 -0400

>>Charlie Parker experimented with the Plastic saxophone earlier though.>
>
>Charlie Parker played just about everything. Apparently he'd run out of
>money and pawn his horn. Someone would buy him a new one. He'd run out of
>money and head for the pawn shop again. As a result, there are trainloads of
>alleged Parker saxes out there, usually with no provenance. I'd sure like to
>have a dollar for every time I've been offered "Charlie Parker's sax" at a
>flea market. Guess I must look like a born sucker, because usually it's a
>beat-up Bundy made years after Parker died.

Miles Davis played with Parker during his (Davis') early years in New York
and recounted some of Parker's excesses. Plainly put, Parker was
alternately--often simultaneously--both a drunk and a hype of Olympian
proportions. Yes, he would regularly hock his instruments for the price of
a few bags of junk. So did Davis himself some years later when the junk
habit got hold of him. Lenny Bruce had a very funny bit involving a
nodding junkie auditioning for Lawrence Welk's orchestra.
"Hey...maaaaan...I knew Bird, maaaaaan. I got Bird's ax." Chances are a
lot of people DID have Bird's ax, maaaaaan, because somehow or other Parker
staggered into another Mark VI as fast as he'd hock the one before, and
they probably were all over the New York pawnshops. The instruments did
not come with Parker's ability to play notes that nobody'd invented yet,
however.

>But he did play the acrylic Grafton by choice for awhile, and recently it
>sold (*with* provenance!) for over $200,000! Ken Wolman is right that
>Ornette Coleman played Graftons, too. Paul Lindemeyer writes, in
>_Celebrating the Saxophone_ (Hearst Books, 1996, p. 27, also the source of
>that incredible price on Parker's Grafton), that Coleman "wore out several"
>Graftons. Unlike plastic clarinets, the Grafton acrylic saxes, made in
>England, were a serious attempt to use new technology to make a top-quality
>professional instrument. Evidently the Graftons sounded terrific, but they
>lacked durability. I don't know why, since plastic clarinets seem just about
>indestructible, but the plastic in the Grafton saxes got brittle and broke
>after a few years, and that's why they disappeared from the market.

I do not remember the specifics of what Coleman played on the sax, except
that I found and find it extremely unpleasant. I can listen for long
stretches to the more outre Coltrane and to Steve Lacy, but Coleman to me
is just unlistenable. The remembered impression of him, however, is that
he played with such intensity that could have melted down a sax made of
cast iron. Mere plastic would not have had a prayer.

For the literati out there, Thomas Pynchon's first novel, "V," has a
terrific portrait of a jazz saxophonist named McClintick Sphere, who also
plays a plastic sax. This is about 1956. Someone listening to him in what
is an obvious knock-off of The Five Spot says "He plays all the notes that
Bird missed," at which point one of the other characters almost drives a
broken beer bottle into the back of his neck.

Ken

Kenneth Wolman kwolman@-----.net
"From the Meadowlands": http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/1649
"For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and
wrong."
--H. L. Mencken

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