When the saxophone was still cool
"THE SAXOPHONE IS, unaided, a humorist. It looks like a sea horse and sounds like a canned fiddle." So wrote one critic in 1912 about an instrument that had only just begun to catch on. By the mid-1920s the sax had sparked its own craze, and it was subsequently taken very seriously indeed by such jazz luminaries as Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Stan Getz.
According to Bruce Vermazen, a retired UC-Berkeley philosopher and author of "That Moaning Saxophone" (Oxford), published this month, we have an unlikely figure to thank for this turn of events: Tom Brown, the blackface-wearing frontman of a now-forgotten act, Six Brown Brothers, whose musical comedy wowed audiences across North America from 1908 to 1933. (This month Archeophone Records is releasing "Those Moaning Saxophones," a Six Brown Brothers compilation with liner notes by Vermazen.) Ideas telephoned Vermazen at home in San Diego.
IDEAS: How did a professor of analytic philosophy wind up writing a comprehensive biography of an obscure vaudeville act?
VERMAZEN: As a teenager I picked up a Six Brown Brothers 78 at a rummage sale. In the `70s, while teaching at Berkeley and playing cornet in a ragtime band, I started researching the act, which, though often credited with starting the saxophone craze of the `20s, remained a mystery. Then in 1996, I met the 84-year-old son of Tom Brown, who was thrilled that I cared about the Six Brown Brothers and gave me a wealth of material.
IDEAS: The Frenchman Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone in 1838. Why did it take 75 years for it to gain a foothold in American popular music?
VERMAZEN: Economics. For decades, saxophones were luxury items. So composers didn't write saxophone parts, and musicians didn't buy the instruments. But in the 1890s, because it looked funny the sax began to be used for comic effect. Tom Brown performed as a minstrel bandsman and spent time in the Ringling Brothers' Circus band before convincing his five brothers -- along with the occasional non-family member -- to form a musical comedy act.
IDEAS: What was the act like?
VERMAZEN: In blackface and enormous shoes, Tom Brown coaxed a vast repertoire of extramusical sounds -- imitations of chickens and bullfrogs, buzzes and squeals, wordless speech -- from the group's instruments. Then, after warming the audience up with their antics, the sextet -- the other five wore clown costumes and whiteface -- knocked `em down with popular ragtime tunes.
IDEAS: Their 1914 record "That Moaning Saxophone Rag" sold 200,000 copies. What was so "surprising," as the song puts it, about the sax?
VERMAZEN: Compared to the trumpet or trombone, even the clarinet, the saxophone gives you much more flexibility in timbre and tone. This allows a musician to personalize his or her sound -- to growl, sing, plead. Great early saxophonists like Frank Trumbauer and Sidney Bechet told stories through their solos. What I don't like about today's big-selling instrumentalists -- Kenny G, in particular -- is that their music, although technically impressive, is merely decorative. They have no stories to tell.
