I bought a beautiful Selmer Mark VI alto saxophone in 1973 at Manny’s Music on West 48th Street in New York City. Its gleaming precision brass, its arcane design and surplus of keys, pads and screws. I was inspired by a high school jazz “class” — a weekly hang with Cliff Lauder, a gym teacher and jazz fan who was friends with Jackie McLean.
Lauder brought in all of McLean’s Blue Notes — I remember first hearing Bluesnik, Let Freedom Ring, and Right Now!, with its cover of bold Courier font slightly askew.
Those sounds really knocked me out. McLean was so forward, so on top, fresh and fearless. His playing seemed to epitomize everything energetic about New York, everything that made you want to explore every inch of the city and its pulse, even the dangerous neighborhoods.
No altoist of the day — except maybe Cannonball and Phil Woods — could keep up with him on swing, the brightness and buoyancy of sound.
Lucky enough to live in the Village in 1974, I started hanging out at the Village Vanguard.
Over a period of Mondays I saw David Sanborn with the Gil Evans Orchestra — here’s an amazing clip of that band from the Umbria Jazz Festival. Seeing him tear it up at the Vanguard was exhilarating. His music electrified the crowd and the other musicians on the bandstand. He was only a couple years older than me, playing with these monster cats and getting the sound I wanted.
The Bird generation
Little did I know how hagiographic in the jazz galaxy Bird was.
I knew “of” Charlie Parker was but I didn’t know “who” he was and his position in jazz. It was before I became addicted to Phil Schaap’s morning Bird Flight with analysis and appreciation to the micro level — no detail of Bird’s itinerary too minuscule to mention.
I hadn’t yet put together the dots that alto players McLean, Cannonball Adderley and Phil Woods found their own creative voice as a result of a historical, cultural jazz continuum. Parker’s sound was the model for all of them. For that matter, I also didn’t understand anything to do with the dreamy Johnny Hodges style, the candy cane of sound and vibrato that tucks you in like a good bedtime story. No — I was getting my bedtime stories from Anthony Braxton and Ornette Coleman.
Carl Woideck describes the Charlie Parker sound in “Charlie Parker: His Music and Life.” Parker’s tone quality differed from the “richness and sensuousness of the prevalent models of Hodges and Carter.”
“That’s the way I thought the style should go,” Parker said in an interview with Paul Desmond. “Ever since I first started hearing music I’ve thought it should be very clean, very precise.”
Jazz historian Lewis Porter makes the point that Parker’s alto sound comes from an outside source: the tenor saxophone timbre of Coleman Hawkins.
Parker’s style differed from Hawkins, however, aa “concise and streamlined” as opposed to Hawkins more “expansive” sonic space. Parker relied on humor but did it through his references rather than gimmicks like scoops and falls, hollers, altissimo and common tools of big band, swing — and later rock ‘n’ roll — players (Earl Bostic Jr. was the best of those!).
While still picking and choosing for characteristics of an earlier day and earlier taste — always inflected with the blues — he just played. Not that he didn’t show his enjoyment of kitsch for kitsch’s sake, as his humor comes through in his extensive quotations of 1940s and 1950s hits. His long, delicious and longer solos laid the track for Lennie Tristano and his harmonic experiments — or was it, as can be seen in their extraordinary duets, their concepts traveled in a parallel direction.
As did the great Sonny Stitt.
Stitt, who played both alto and tenor, shared Bird’s concept — or, as is argued — shaped it. He spent way too much time explaining himself to critics. “Everyone should want to be themselves,” Stitt said in a 1965 interview.
“I’m always going to be myself. Like, when they talk about me and Charlie Parker. Me and Charlie Parker sounded the same way years and years and years ago. He said: ‘You sound like me.’ I said: ‘Well, you sound like me.’ And we agreed: ‘We can’t help that, can we?’ Then we’d go off and get some beer, play some music, or something.”
It took me decades to tune into Lee Konitz, a Tristano disciple. His tone is sere and focused. His solos which I once found dense and ponderous are now miraculous serpentine statements that guide you through surprising diversions.
Also, you feel smarter after listening to him.
Like his mentor Tristano, the idea is to play the song so often that you can sing the notes of the solo. Here’s an example, with Tristano and tenor player Warne Marsh.
Miles took heat for hiring a white guy on alto.
“And I remember one time when I hired Lee Konitz, some colored cats bitched a lot about me hiring an ofay in my band when Negroes didn't have work,” Miles said in his famous 1962 Playboy interview with Alex Haley. “I said if a cat could play like Lee, I would hire him, I didn't give a damn if he was green and had red breath.”
‘I’ve been trying to eliminate “pretty” from my sound and expression.’
— Lee Konitz
Konitz must have seen a side of himself he didn’t care for in Paul Desmond’s playing, whose music he admired, but “I didn’t really love it.”
“When I first him I wanted to change my style more, to get away from whatever was pretty in my sound,” Konitz said. “I’ve been trying to eliminate ‘pretty’ from my sound and expression.”
What is an alto sound?
Larry Teal in the “Art of the Saxophone” enumerates the variables in a horn: instrument, embouchure, mouthpiece and reed to start. His “tonal terminology” is a wonderful compendium: intensity, resonance, core, edge, color and timbre. Its voice seeded the blues, Gospel sounds, 1920s dance and society music, marching band, swing, modern classical, Hollywood, rock and jazz — not to mention styles around the world.
Bird’s sonic influence on jazz receded in the 1970s with the appearance of alto players influenced by the tenor style of John Coltrane. Ornette Coleman’s magical musical odyssey spawned still another generation of alto players exploring the music’s limits from pleasure to pain.
Just as Desmond symbolized a dry martini and smoky lounges, the 1980s fell prey to the sorry sounds of the wailing, lovelorn alto saxophone.
Done well, it was sublime, but I think I heard too many soaring alto saxophones in those 1980s soundtracks.
Nobody could even get near the bedroom without an alto saxophone buzzing overhead.
Sounds like we have a similar listening experience! Nice viewpoint!
Have heard Patrick Bartley? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JfKenSm-tQ&t=1298s