St. Pat's Gig...

Well pre St. Pat's, it was actually the day before. Miguel debuted his C melody sax and it sounded great after a recent fix up.

The C melody is an interesting instrument with most of it's history dating from the early 20th century. In the key of c, no transposition necessary it can play charts written for violin, flute and so on. It was designed as a parlor instrument with a more subdued sound than alto or tenor that could be taken up quickly by beginners in a living room family band. As used here with modern amplification (around here that late 70s Bassman amp in the back ground counts as modern) and a tenor mouth piece the sound is rocked up a bit.

The popularity of the C melody crashed with the stock market in 1929. Instrument makers were forced by economic times to scale back production to a narrower variety of instruments and many of these niche instruments such as this were eliminated from the cultural land scape of America. Kind of the way eating out has gone these days, Chedder's, Olive Garden, Logan's, alto, tenor, bari, and on down the road it's the same thing all over again. Actually even though there were very few to none of these horns produced 1929 onward there is actually a New Zealand company with some in production today

Is this the best horn in town? Probably not. It could well date to the 1920s. It does score major cool points.

Here's Larry, Miguel and Runt with a pre gig run down of the changes. I think it might have actually done some good.