Sax Appeal

0:00This episode is brought to you by Audi. We all know that feeling. A change of plans. A new opportunity. Instead of overthinking, what if you just said yes? With the all-new Audi Q3, the answer is easy. It's made for the yes life. With the power and room to handle whatever pops up. Yes to adventure. Yes to right now. Because saying yes without hesitation, that's real luxury. The all-new Audi Q3. Made for the yes life. Learn more at AudiUSA.com.

0:58more results now with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. And listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring? Do it the right way with Indeed. This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I want you to imagine a world where you can just invent a musical instrument. I don't mean when you were a kid and you put some rubber bands on a tissue box. I mean, you come up with a new instrument, almost from scratch, and then watch as that instrument gets taken up and played in nearly every marching band, jazz band, and high school music classroom across the country.

1:43There actually was a time where this kind of thing happened. That's reporter Jay Coburn. In the 19th century, Western Europe saw an explosion of instrument innovation, where the entire landscape of instrumentation was shifting. and where there was money to be made if your improvements caught on with the public. This is when many of the instruments we know today reached their modern forms. Trumpets had been around since Roman times, but in the 19th century they took on the valved form we know today. And flutes went from being conical wooden instruments to metal cylinders. But one of the greatest innovations to come out of this time was the saxophone.

2:23The saxophone wasn't an improvement on a previous instrument. it was a brand new invention. A hybrid of brass and woodwind that not only managed to secure a spot in the musical canon, but also went on to change American music forever. Its design came from the mind of a brash young entrepreneur. His name, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Sax. Adolf Sax was born in Dino, Belgium in 1814. His full name was actually Antoine Joseph Sax, but at the time Adolf wasn't, you know, taken. So he went by that instead. It's difficult not to remember him as this romanticised figure. The rags to riches to rags, the fiery temper.

3:08This is Dr Stephen Cottrell, Emeritus Professor of Music at City St George's University of London. The brilliant innovator, yet saddled with personal demons and professional challenges throughout his life. Dr. Cottrell is the author of a book called The Saxophone, but that book might never have been written because Sax nearly died before he invented anything, like many, many times. Adolf Sax was the eldest of 11 children, only four of whom made it to age 30, so the odds were stacked against young Adolf from the start. And I'm going to need a deep breath before I list the ways he apparently nearly died as a kid.

3:51he fell three flights of stairs and cracked his head on a stone floor he drank a mixture of vitriol probably what we would call sulfuric acid today and water mistaking it for milk he was burned in a gunpowder explosion and then again when a frying pan was knocked over a stone fell off a roof and left a lifelong scar on his head and he once fell asleep in a room full of freshly varnished furniture but was luckily found before he succumbed to the fumes i think what we're getting here is a picture of somebody who is energetic, getting into scrapes, whether it's falling downstairs, whether it's going to sleep in a room where varnish is drying, whether it's having his head cracked open.

4:31Some of these stories might be apocryphal, but this long list of mishaps is probably why his mother once said that, quote, he's a child condemned to misfortune. He won't live. Thanks, mom. She was right about the first part, but not about the second, because again, Against all odds, Adolf did survive his tragicomic childhood. And as a young adult, he joined his father in the family business, making musical instruments. Adolf's father, Charles Joseph Sachs, had gotten into instrument making because he was a musician himself. His professional training had been as a carpenter, but when he joined a woodwind band in Dinant, he didn't have an instrument.

5:11So he taught himself to make one. That must have gone pretty well, because soon he moved to Brussels and set up an instrument shop. That's where young Adolf Sachs learned his craft. I think we have to remember we're now talking early 19th century. Musical instrument making in Europe at this time was not done in big factories. There was no industrialisation involved. It was small, artisanal, individual craftsmen. It's much more a craft-oriented tradition. Young Adolf clearly felt the pull of opportunity. As a teen, he was enrolled in the Royal School of Music in Brussels. He was an impressive musician, a virtuoso on the flute and clarinet.

5:49When he was about 20, one composer even dedicated a clarinet piece to Adolf Sachs. There was a promising career as a musician waiting for him, but he was lured back to the family instrument workshop. While working alongside his dad, Adolf started experimenting with the instrument he knew best, the clarinet. Specifically, the bass clarinet. The bass clarinet was kind of a quirky novelty at the time. It was difficult to play and sounded kind of nasal, and it was so long that it was difficult to get your fingers in the right place. It looked a bit like a folded bassoon. So Adolf Sachs experimented with new key work, the metal parts that you press to close the holes.

6:32He also used the science of acoustics to make the placement of those holes more precise. People would put these boreholes in more or less wherever they felt it looked about right. He came up with the measurements. He decided to make this a much more scientific operation than previously in determining where the holes actually needed to be cut. This improvement meant that each instrument sounded more in tune. And when played together, the bass clarinet sounded more harmonious. And so in 1835, in his early 20s, Adolf Sachs took his bass clarinet to an instrument show. And 19th century Belgian instrument aficionados loved it.

7:11In fact, the bass clarinets used in orchestras today still owe their design to Adolf Sachs, a wooden tube covered in keys that curves into a metal bell shape at the bottom end. The top end crooks into a mouthpiece with a wooden reed to blow on. In other words, the bass clarinet looks a lot like the saxophone eventually would. With his redesign of the bass clarinet, the name Sax was beginning to be known in musical circles. But if he really wanted to make the big francs, he had to move to Paris. Brussels were very small at the time and Paris was one of the major musical centres in Europe. And Paris was particularly the centre of brass wind manufacture.

7:52You had to be seen to be producing your new brass and wind instruments if you were going to be successful. In 1843, Adolf Sachs set up a workshop there and got to experimenting. He came up with new families of horns. The sax horns, which were valved brass instruments that looked a bit like upright trumpets. And the saxotrombas, which were valved brass instruments that looked a bit like upright trumpets. There are videos of people playing these on the internet. This is the sax horn.

8:25And this is the saxo-tromba.

8:35And perhaps it's worth noting here that Adolf Sachs didn't really invent these instruments, so much as improve on things that already existed. And then added sax to the name. If you asked Adolf though, he'd probably tell you this was a mere technicality. Don't be such a sax downer. He'd say he was here to disrupt the industry. Move fast and break things. Sax style. Although Adolf was churning out a variety of instruments, none of them had been a big enough hit to make him properly rich. He was one instrument maker among many in Paris, all competing for the attention of orchestras and private buyers.

9:13So he came up with a plan to secure his own niche in a competitive market. He went after a client so huge, so wealthy, that their business could set him up for life. Because since time immemorial, there's been one tried and true way for an entrepreneur to make a ton of money. Adolf Sachs wanted to land a military contract. If you could get a contract with the French military to supply brass instruments or brass wind instruments, then that was going to be the backbone of your business. You were going to sell far more instruments to the French military than you ever were going to the orchestras in Paris.

9:50If cannons and cavalry were how a country demonstrated military prowess, then music was how it showed its cultural might. And France was lagging behind. Austria and Prussia's military bands were leading the way with fancy new valve technology and their brass instruments, which made for loud, impressive displays. France's military band, on the other hand, was still dominated by woodwind instruments, which are tuneful and elegant, but not loud enough to fill a parade ground. In 1845, the French Ministry of War established a commission to investigate improvements to military bands, and Sax decided that he was going to hit it big by designing the perfect instrument to lift French military bands out of the toilettes.

10:35Adolphe thought he could have the best of both brass and woodwinds with a little tinkering. His starting point was this other instrument that was common in bands at the time called the Offerclide. It's a little bit difficult to describe. If you turned a trumpet on its end with the bell pointing up to the sky and then made it about 30 times bigger, you've got the general shape of an offerclide. The offerclide had this going for it. It was loud. But other than that, it was pretty much a dud. It's a big honking instrument that was difficult to play in tune. This is a recording of an offerclide I found online.

11:23The composer Hector Berlioz said, The quality of these low sounds is rude. It is as if a bull escaped from its stall, had come to play off its vagaries in the middle of a drawing room. The Offerclade was usually part of the low bass end of the orchestra, where the tuba sits today. And so Sax saw this area of the bands and the orchestras as needing attention. And he therefore looked at the Offerclade, and he experimented with the Offerclade. Adolf Sachs borrowed from his earlier project, the bass clarinet, and created a sort of hybrid brass and reed instrument. He quite literally took the brass mouthpiece that was on the Offerclide and replaced it with a bass clarinet mouthpiece.

12:08That's what we believe he did in the late 1830s. And the reed mouthpiece would make a smoother, softer sound. It would make a richer harmonic spectrum. Adolf also placed the boreholes scientifically, the way he had with the bass clarinet. Crucially, this wasn't just one instrument. It was a whole family. Adolf Sax was looking to improve the entire ensemble. And so he created families of similar instruments at different pitches. He'd already done this with the sax horns and saxatrombas a few years before. The idea was to create a chorus of instruments working together, a little like a choir of human voices, with altos, tenors, sopranos, and bass, all working together in harmony.

12:52And just like his sax horns and saxotrombas, he named them after himself, the saxophones. Adolph Sax patented his family of saxophones in 1846. There are eight figures on that patent, ranged by size and pitch. Some of them are straight, some are more like an offaclide. But right at the center of that lineup was an instrument with a bell-shaped horn, a reed mouthpiece, and an iconic S-shape. Adolf had created a brand new kind of instrument, one that was light and sturdy. The S-shape in particular was easy to hold while marching. It was loud enough to carry over a parade ground, but with the rich harmonics and refined tone of a clarinet.

13:36This was the perfect instrument for a military band, and it sounded like this.

13:56This is the sound of a saxophone made by Adolf Sax himself in the 1860s.

14:09This antique is being played by Dr. Paul Cohen. When I was reading about the development of the saxophone, pretty much every article was either written by or had contributions from Paul, After I called him up, he invited me to visit his saxophone museum in New Jersey. When saxophonists come here, it's like a saxophone painting zoo, because they're allowed to play all these instruments if they bring their mouthpieces. How many saxophones do you have? I stopped counting a while ago, but it's around 250. Some people say that it's the largest private collection in the world. The Adolf Sax original is a beautiful instrument.

14:47The brass has barely dulled with age. It carries Adolf Sachs' Maker's Mark engraved next to some ornate cursive script detailing the address of his workshop in Paris. How does it feel as a player compared to your modern performance saxophone? It's so light and the sound is so transparent, I feel like I'm playing on a cloud. And I feel that if I play too hard, I'm going to fall through the cloud. That is a lovely metaphor. Sax had created and patented a whole line of saxophones and sax horns. But that didn't mean he'd sealed the deal for the French military contract. He still needed to present his inventions to the military and convince them that these instruments were the key to bringing their band to the next level.

15:31Military bands like the orchestra can be stuffy, conservative places. You can imagine how they might bristle at a brash young Belgian who slapped his name on a trumpet and called it a sax horn, Especially when he starts saying that the military should abandon their oboes and bassoons for all these saxtraments that he just made up. But like any good entrepreneur, Adolf Sachs did a lot of networking in Paris. And he made friends with some very influential composers and writers who really did believe in the superiority of his instruments. They wrote about Adolf's creations in the musical press, helping him make the case for his vision of a new type of military band.

16:10So there was this ongoing debate in the press about what kind of instruments should be in the French military. Ultimately, the commission decided to let the public settle the matter in the only way a musical debate can be settled. A battle of the bands. The French Ministry of War set up a competition to find out whether sax's instruments could actually outmatch the instrumentation of a conventional military band. On one side, the sax band, full of sax horns and saxophones, led by Adolf Sax. His supporters were known as, no surprises here, Saxons. On the other side, a traditional military band, which at the time was woodwind heavy, with two oboes, two bassoons, and 13 clarinets.

16:55Adolf Sax did away with those oboes and bassoons, and he kept just seven clarinets. In their place, he had 18 sax horns and two saxophones, as well as some more modern trumpets and trombones. This was a big deal. The press was full of rumours about nefarious forces trying to interfere. Now, there are stories that people tried to sabotage sax's bands. They bought off some of his instrumentalists. They tried to find ways in which the saxophones couldn't be played, etc., etc. This kind of thing seemed to happen to Sax all the time. Throughout his career, you can find wild tales of shadowy enemies and their plans to thwart him.

17:38There's one story of a bomb being planted in Sax's bed. I found another story of one of Sax's top employees being murdered, stabbed through the heart by an assassin who mistook him for his boss. Apparently. These stories are possibly true, and lots of them originate in sensational newspaper reports or biographies where the original source was Sax himself or his close family. But it's clear that he had made a lot of enemies. And on the day of the Battle of the Bands, seven of Sax's musicians really didn't show up. They were apparently, apparently, bribed to stay out of the way. But that didn't stop Sax, who played some of the instruments himself.

18:22Apparently. On April 22nd, 1845, two bands, two different sets of instruments, and one audience showed up at the Champs-de-Mar, a long public park in Paris. Today, the park is home to the Eiffel Tower, but back then, its focal point was the École Militaire, the military school. The press had drummed up public interest, so the bands were facing a large crowd. Among the audience were members of the military commission, journalists, artists and senior officers. They were there to judge the quality of the sound and how well it carried outdoors. The two bands played the same pieces of music, one after the other.

19:02The traditional woodwind-centric band went first. Then it was the turn of the rousing horns of the sax band. Sax's instruments would have been more homogenous. They would have sounded better together. in part because he was making most or all of them. And so the brass instruments were all made to his specifications. He added the saxophones in, which would have given more volume to the band. So clearly volume is an important issue here. These were louder instruments, probably in closer harmony because of sax's scientific approach, played outdoors by military bands. And the sax band had much more bass presence thanks to his sax horns.

19:45After four hours of performance, the audience cheered for both bands, but the cheers for Adolf Sachs' sax band were louder. Loud enough for him to be declared the winner of the battle. That seal of approval was enough for the French military. Adolf Sachs won that sweet, sweet military contract. I've got a properly French quote translated from a newspaper here. A Stradivarius violin compared with a violin from the village. A glass of generous Bordeaux next to an adulterated beverage made in Serraine. That's a suburb of Paris. That is the difference which exists between the old music and that proposed by Monsieur Saxe.

20:30He won the contract to supply the French military with instrumentation for their bands that was more along the lines he wanted. So for a while then, Saxe's business is booming. Sax's victory meant that he had a huge influx of cash and a steady customer. A standard military band was now required to include his inventions. No more oboes and bassoons. Now there were sax horns and saxophones. He even made some technical improvements to the other brass instruments and sold his own versions of those as well. Military life was hard on instruments and they needed to be replaced often. All this ended up to big business for Sax.

21:09But despite his success, Adolf's hubris and his enemies eventually caught up to him. He got tied up in expensive lawsuits over the patents for his instruments. The saxophone patents did hold up, but when France lost the Franco-Prussian War, the military downsized its bands. Sax took on loans he couldn't afford and went bankrupt three times. He lost his factory, but perhaps more heartbreaking to him, he lost his music. Adolf Sachs' collection of over 400 musical instruments was taken from him and sold to pay off his debts. He would have been collecting those instruments because they really represented what he wanted to know about musical instruments.

21:51I think they would have really meant something to him. And so although there was relatively little monetary value in them, emotionally that would have hurt. because he'd spent a lifetime building up that collection, keeping them carefully, and to see them all sold off to other people like that would have probably hurt as much as anything else that happened. That final bankruptcy was in 1877. He spent the last 17 years of his life scraping by, begging friends and family for money. Antoine Joseph Adolph Sachs died of pneumonia in absolute poverty in Paris on February 7th, 1894. After a lifetime of work by Adolf Sachs, his instrument was no longer a commercial success.

22:33But he still earned a permanent place in history. There are statues of him in Dinant, where he was born. Those statues probably wouldn't be there if it weren't for what happened next, an ocean away. That's after the break.

22:51Even as the French military was pulling back funding and saxophone sales in Europe were falling off, the instrument was gaining traction in the United States. The saxophone's place in the US, however, was not just in the military. It was marketed as a cheap, fun instrument that was relatively easy to play. And people loved it. In fact, in the early 20th century, the US experienced what became known as a saxophone craze. American saxophone manufacturers churned out dozens of novelty instruments. One of them glides like a slide whistle. Another is so small it looks absurd to play. Paul Cohen has quite a few of them at his saxophone museum in New Jersey.

23:30I recorded Paul playing a bunch of novelty saxophones. They sound amazing. I promise you that we'll play them later. There's even one that scares my cat. Pretty soon, these saxophones were being played in circuses, in vaudeville acts, and in people's homes. It was marketed as a great social tool. Play the saxophone and be more popular. Would it be like, you know, you go around your friend's house and it would be quite likely they'd have a saxophone there? More than likely they'd have two. Home music making was a big deal. And we have many pictures in catalogs and articles that show the family surrounding the piano and the saxophone player looking over the shoulder, playing off the piano part, participating in the musical merriment.

24:13The saxophone craze lasted from 1915 to around the time the Depression hit. With less money in people's pockets, there was less demand for wacky saxophones. But the saxophones didn't disappear. And all those instruments from the sax craze were still floating around. And they got picked up and used to pioneer what would become America's defining musical genre. When we got to the late 1920s, jazz in a big band form was starting to become the happening music and music ensemble. Depression's here, but we're all still drinking and partying, right? 30s come along. Now the band's job is to keep the dancers on the dance floor.

24:55This is Lakeisha Benjamin. She's played saxophone with Prince, with Stevie Wonder and Alicia Keys, and she's been nominated for six Grammys. But like, she's played saxophone with Prince, and I feel like that alone is enough of an intro. She says that 1930s jazz was all about getting people moving. It's different when it's your job to keep the party going. And the instrument that they called on for that was a saxophone. They were even sax battles. People would go and just see Cal Basie band versus Duke Lines' band, and they would just completely try to murder each other. Their saxophone playing was real raunchy.

25:29I'll just sing it, even though it's going to sound terrible. It'd be real.