Tram on
alto sax?
This is a question that has always fascinated me. Tram is (by no
means always, but predominantly) listed as just playing C-melody saxophone. As
a long-time admirer of Tram and myself a clarinet and saxophone player,
including C-melody saxophone, my studies have tended to suggest that Tram
played alto saxophone from time to time. Quite a bit in fact.
However, I have found (to my surprise) that
this is, to some people, a controversial topic. Almost as if, in simply trying to
firm up some guidelines to help indicate which horn he may have played on which
record, (a VERY difficult thing, as you will see if you read on...), this
necessarily involves 'diminishing' Trumbauer's musical gifts, artistry and
abilities in some way. This is not so, as it is those very talents and
attainments of Tram that have fascinated me for the last 40 years and indeed
led to this little article, the better to try to get even more insight and
understanding of Tram's wonderful musical legacy to us.
I sincerely hope that you will not be offended
by anything you may read here; rest assured that however indispensible Tram is
to you, he is no less indispensible to me!
HOW MUCH ALTO DID TRAM PLAY?
(I am very grateful to my friend Steve Walker, who read the
original draft of this article, and by efficiently fulfilling the role of
‘devil’s advocate’ saved me from quite a number of embarrassing errors and
misapprehensions.)
In many personnels, Frank Trumbauer is
usually listed as playing only C-melody saxophone. This was an instrument which
had a considerable vogue in the period outlined above. As a non-transposing
instrument, its player could simply read the music of the vocal line of a
normal piano copy of a popular song, without the need for a special part, such
as would have been the case with an alto or tenor saxophone.
As the C-melody was a favourite for the
amateur playing in the home along with the parlour piano, the makers appear to
have slightly re-designed the instrument. They customarily have a less-flared
bore than one would expect. This gives the C-melody a soft, even a velvety
tone, which was doubtless the intention of the makers, rendering the instrument
better for use in the living-room. (Remember, the saxophone had originally been
devised as an ‘outdoor’ instrument for military bands in
Yet the C-melody was forever an odd,
eccentric instrument. When they appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, saxes
had originally been made in C and F. That is, the soprano in C, alto in F,
tenor in C, baritone in F, and bass in C. Later, for whatever reason, they were
made that bit larger, giving us the now-familiar soprano in Bb, alto in Eb,
tenor in Bb and baritone in Eb and bass in Bb.
You could therefore look on the C-melody
as a ‘fossil’ survival of this earlier family, placed between the modern alto
and tenor. This gives rise to the obvious question, is it equivalent to a large
alto or a small tenor? It was a tenor to start with, after all! To be fair,
it’s pitched only one tone above the current tenor, and three semitones below
the alto. So it’s nearer a tenor in pitch. But it’s a lot nearer the alto in
size. So what is it? A small tenor or a large alto? Oh, it’s called the C tenor
on orchestral parts, but that’s just a name! Besides, as we’ve seen, it
definitely was a tenor once.
The answer is as indefinable as the
instrument itself. Quite simply, it can be whatever the player wants to make it
be. To this writer, Tram chooses to treat it as a large alto, especially in the
Bix period. Other people did things differently: Jack Pettis, the only other
famous player who persistently used C-melody, seems to us to have adopted the
‘small tenor’ approach. ‘Booting’ is not quite what Pettis does on the
C-melody, but he comes as near to that as is possible with this idiosyncratic
instrument. (Let it be said here once and for all, if you put a tenor
mouthpiece on a C-melody, it will then readily ‘default’ to a tenor, and you
can ‘boot’ on it, but that is not the inherent nature of the instrument. And
besides, if you want to ‘boot’, the tenor is the obvious instrument to do it on
anyway! Conversely, if you have chosen the ‘large alto’ route, as I suggest
Tram did, then you can put on an alto mouthpiece which will give the C-melody
an even more refined tone than it has already. I don’t know what mouthpiece(s)
Tram used on his C-melodies; but Rudy Wiedoeft is known to have used an alto
mouthpiece on his (perhaps not always), just as Rollini used a baritone
mouthpiece on his bass sax to ‘refine’ the tone and response of that large
horn. (It need hardly be said that the choice of mouthpiece to go on the
‘wrong’ saxophone is very critical, but fortunately that topic lies well
outside the scope of this modest article!))
Yet for all its advantages as a
‘parlour’ instrument, the C-melody was by no means ideal for the modern dance
orchestra as it developed in the early 1920s. Why?
The typical range of keys in use at the
time for the dance (Jazz) orchestra was:
|
G |
C |
F |
B flat |
E flat |
A flat |
D flat |
|
- |
C-melody |
- |
Soprano |
Alto |
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
Tenor |
Baritone |
- |
- |
As can be seen, the normal family of
saxophones are pitched at or near the centre of the spread of keys. Thus, their
key signatures would conveniently range between three sharps and three flats
for the soprano and tenor, and four sharps and two flats for the alto and
baritone. (To the less skilled musician of course, this also represents the
spread of 'difficultness' of playing: the further from the home key of the
instrument, the more sharps or flats in the key signature and hence the more
difficult the piece to execute well).
But the C-melody is well offset from the
centre, and to cope with all normal major keys would have to play with up to
five flats This would have been difficult for very many players at the stage
that modern rhythmic music (Jazz) had reached in the early 1920s. However,
Trumbauer was of course already a virtuoso by this time. This is the main
reason that the C-melody saxophone made little headway in the Jazz orchestra.
Other reasons were (a) its 'different'
sound (by virtue of its narrower bore) would have prevented it blending with
the ‘consort’ of saxophones in Bb and Eb, and (b) its proximity to the pitch of
alto and tenor saxes would have tended to make it redundant in any case.
So far so good! But what is this article
actually about?
It all started when I got my first
C-melody saxophone. Now I can try to learn the classic solo from SINGIN’ THE
BLUES, I thought. However, SINGIN’ THE BLUES is in (piano) Eb, which is three
flats on the C-melody saxophone. That’s like playing in Db on a tenor, or a
clarinet for that matter. I found it quite impossible to make any significant
headway, and abandoned the project. After all Tram was a world-class virtuoso
and I was a rank amateur. It had obviously been presumptuous on my part to
attempt to tread in the Footsteps Of The Gods!
But years later, while playing SINGING
THE BLUES on the alto saxophone, I light-heartedly attempted to play the Tram
solo, and found to my surprise, delight - (and consternation!), that the solo
was very much easier to play on the alto than on the C-melody. Not that I could
actually play it all, you understand, but large passages of it ‘fell under the
fingers’, and seemed to ‘fit’ the alto, as it were.
I trembled; a heretical thought had come
to me. Was Tram playing alto on SINGIN’ THE BLUES?
I banished the thought. (Tram could play
anything in any key!)
But the thought returned. (Tram would
not pick an ‘easy’ instrument for a solo in Eb!)
It would not go away. (Can we find out
what he played? If so, how?)
So was born THE
QUEST.
OBJECTIVES: #1: DID
TRAM EVER PLAY ALTO ON RECORDS?
ASSUMPTION: TRAM IS
ON ALTO SOMEWHERE!
METHOD: Er,
well; listen to the records again I suppose.
That was my first approach, and it was
the obvious one to try. I picked the Trumbauer Orchestra OKeh sides, beginning
with TRUMBOLOGY. This was simply because I had most of them on original 78
master pressings, and there would thus be little likelihood of mistaking what
key they were in.
But as I listened to what after all were
familiar sides, with this new approach, it soon became obvious that this system
wasn’t going to work very well, if at all. Because I discovered that, almost
always, you can’t tell whether Tram is playing C-melody or alto (assuming he
ever does) by just listening!
This is because Tram produced virtually
the same sound from both instruments. This is remarkable in itself, as the
C-melody, as we have shown, generally has a characteristic tone. We can only
account for this by saying that Tram, when playing the alto, produced the same
sound as on C-melody.
This sounds an over-facile statement,
but Trumbauer is in fact on record as saying that he spent years on developing
the sound of his saxophone playing to be as nearly like the human voice as
possible. Thus, were he to use two different instruments, it is inevitable that
he would require them to sound the same.
Thus, simply sitting back and listening
to the records themselves is of practically no use whatever.
Another approach was necessary. The only
one we could think of was to concentrate on the difference in compass of the
two saxophones. The alto can play three semitones higher than the C-melody. Very
well: we would look for occurrences of those three notes, and if they occurred,
it would indicate that Tram must be playing alto, because those notes just
aren’t on the C-melody.
But it is possible to extend the range
of any saxophone upwards by over half an octave by using special fingerings! A
chart of these fingerings is given in the Jimmy Dorsey saxophone tutor (not
sure what date this is), which begins by treating high F# as an ‘out-of-range’
note. Saxophones normally ended at a high F, but an extension to F# was fitted
as fairly standard by the early 1930s.
Trumbauer, as a top-line veteran even by
the early 20s, must have known about these special fingerings. So how much did
he use them?
More profitable might be consideration of
low notes: after all, if your sax ends at low Bb, (as they all do except some
modern baritones) there ain’t any way of making it go any lower! But most sax
players don’t
Right; that’s enough theorising, and
it’s getting us nowhere. Let’s look for some things that are favourable to our
quest.
Well, as many musicians actually are,
Tram appears to have been extremely conservative about his instrument(s). He
replied to a comment about the 'beat-up' looking nature of his horn to the
effect that 'it took me years of work to get this instrument to play just how I
want; it's been my meal ticket for many years and will continue to be so...'
There’s a fine picture of Tram with his
C-melody in the photo. section of TRAM The Frank Trumbauer Story by Evans and
Kiner (1994). He’s with the ‘Three T’s’ so it was taken around 1936 and it
looks like the C-melody does NOT have a high F#, but I can’t be sure.
But mainly, in that same photo section
is a picture of the Whiteman reed section in 1932, and LO! Tram is holding an
alto. If he held one he probably played it and if he probably played it he
probably recorded with it? He recorded on cornet and clarinet didn’t he, on
DEEP HARLEM? Come on, there MUST be SOME Tram alto on record somewhere!
The original draft of this article
considered forty-seven sides by the Trumbauer Orchestra, in other words, most
of them from TRUMBOLOGY to HOW AM I TO KNOW. In some cases, purely
circumstantial evidence was presented for his use of C-melody, some for use of
alto; many tracks produced no particular indication one way or another.
But what I am going to do here is just
list the four most likely occasions on which I ‘intuitively’ felt that Tram was
on alto, present the circumstantial evidence and put it to people better
qualified that myself to say ‘Yea!’ or ‘Nay!’
#1
RIVERBOAT SHUFFLE. (Key Ab)
In the last chorus, at bars (measures) 7 and 8, Tram plays a
truly startling break:
This is just a very rough idea of how it goes, but the point is,
the high notes in the second bar aren’t in the normal compass of a C-melody
sax. So I seriously suggest he is playing alto here.. Indeed, he’s playing the
top note on the alto, F and the D below.
To hear an mp3 of this break three times, click
here.
#2 JUST
AN HOUR OF LOVE. (Keys F, Ab, F, Ab)
Tram solos in the final Ab chorus, and his solo includes an alto
top E, again higher than a C-melody. I think Tram is on alto here as well.
To hear an mp3 of this part three times, click
here.
#3 LILA
(Keys C, Eb, C, Eb)
In the coda, Tram plays a note that is alto high Eb, off the top of the
C-melody. Bix enters over the second note in the second bar
To hear an mp3 of this three times, click here.
#4
LOUISE (Keys F, Eb)
Although there are no notes outside the compass of the C-melody
here, this phrase from Tram’s solo is so much in the nature of a ‘noodling’
break on the alto, that I feel convinced it’s that horn he’s playing.
To hear an mp3 of this
three times, click here.
I have ‘begged the question’ I admit by
putting these examples in the alto key, and I would also freely confess that
I’m not a ‘reading’ musician at all, just a ‘busker’, but I had to try and
write these simple examples down somehow!
What do YOU think?
Remember, I’m not for an instant
suggesting that Tram ‘had to resort to another instrument’, or that he couldn’t
have - played everything on the C-melody. It’s simply because I am such a big
fan of Tram that I want to find out as much as possible about his playing.
Can you help? Do you have any comments
or observations? If so, please email me at:
N.B.
(added June 2007) The distinguished musician Scott Robinson has kindly outlined
another and better approach to this question. Rather than concentrate on the
extremes of the saxophone compass, attention should be given to the ‘break’
between the registers of the saxophone. The sound of the sax. may change
between the C sharp at the top of the lower register, and the D at the bottom
of the upper register. Even in the hands of a master player like Tram, there
may be a perceptible change of tone - and this could be emphasised on recordings
where he is relatively close to the microphone. Because in that case, the sound
will physically emerge from the top of the horn on the C sharp and bottom of
the horn on the D. The microphone might emphasise this. As yet, I have done no
work using Scott’s approach.
(Originally written in 1995, unpublished and revised August 2000.)
Audio
samples added