Jimmie’s Sax-o-telephone
Here’s “Now Listen, Mabel” from 9-25 to 10-4-1919. Starting in the 9-29 strip, Jimmie Doozinberry’s pal butts in on Jimmie’s harmonica serenade over the telephone to Mabel. The office rival uses a saxophone, probably a C-Melody Saxophone, which was in use in the 19-teens and 19-twenties in parlors and small ragtime jazz bands. Frankie Trumbauer, a C-Melody saxophonist and friend of Bix Beiderbecke in the twenties, did some great jazz recordings with the saxophone. It’s very funny in the 10-3, that Mabel prefers the yowling of two pre-Krazy cats to the sound of Jimmie’s sax. It’s interesting that the saxophone was invented by Adolphe Sax in 1842, and is really a brass instrument, like a cornet, with a clarinet mouth piece on it. The saxophone is louder that most other woodwinds, hence it’s versatility used in symphony orchestras and jazz bands. The instrument in the last panel of the 9-26 is a Barrel Organ. That little handle was turned, and a wooden “roll”, similar to a player-piano roll, would rub up against the keys and valves, producing a rather screechy melodic sound. The Barrel Organ dated to 1854, and the gag here is that Mabel and party are expecting Jimmie to show up with a traditional instrument, not a mechanical one. I love Garge’s layout in the 9-26 as well, one long panel in the middle of the group having a picnic, and the first and third panels laid on top of the sartorial scene. I love the design of the office telephone, The mouthpiece has an unusual white cylindrical shape, quite unlike the standard “candlestick” telephone of the era. Dial phones first came in to use in December, 1919, so Jimmie’s office phone would have been operator-assisted dialing.
I hope you enjoy these strips, readers. To enlarge them to full screen, just right-click your mouse on the image, and you should see a “Open in New Window” item in the menu list. Click on that, and you should see the strips in a new widow, much larger. Enjoy, Mark
Eric Costello says:
One thing I do know is that during the period of the Spanish Flu, you could get telephones with glass mouthpieces that could be disinfected in a way that was much easier, compared to the standard “candlestick” type. Given that this is 1919, perhaps it’s one of those?
Paul Groh says:
The correct answer to the question “Is the saxophone a brass instrument or a woodwind?” is “Neither, and both.” Being made of brass and having a single-reed mouthpiece like a clarinet (but not a clarinet mouthpiece), it combines the worst of both worlds. Adolphe Sax developed the saxophone line as an alternative to the family of clarinets, which is larger than you may realise, ranging from the tiny piccolino in A-flat to the contrabass in B-flat. The clarinet has a cylindrical bore, which accounts for its unique acoustic qualities but also creates certain challenges for the player, such as a noticeable “break” between registers and some awkward “throat tones” just below the break. The saxophone has a conical bore that eliminates those particular problems but raises new ones, and it took many decades of tinkering with the key mechanism to resolve them.
A few 19th-century French composers, such as Delibes and Bizet, wrote for the saxophone in their orchestral scores, but it never caught on in the symphony orchestra, being too noisy to blend satisfactorily with the other sections. By 1870 the Paris Conservatoire had ceased to offer instruction in saxophone and would not resume it until well into the 20th century. The instrument seemed destined for obsolescence, and might have gone the way of the shawm and the sackbut, had it not proven popular in American military bands of the post-Civil War era. Many of those instruments later wound up in pawn shops, where they were eagerly snatched up by impecunious jazz musicians. The rest, as they say, is history.
Sax originally conceived of two separate saxophone families, one set keyed in C and F for use in symphony orchestras, the other in B-flat and E-flat for wind bands. Since the saxophone failed to catch on as an orchestral instrument, very few of the former were ever produced. Twentieth-century orchestral works that incorporate the saxophone, such as Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Ravel’s “Bolero”, invariably use instruments of the B-flat/E-flat family. (“Bolero” actually calls for a sopranino sax in F, but there’s no evidence that such an instrument was ever made, and the part is normally played on a B-flat soprano.) The C-melody sax, as you noted, enjoyed a brief resurgence of popularity in the teens and ’20s but was marketed mainly to amateur players. It has a less obnoxious tone than the B-flat tenor and is hence better suited to a parlour setting; and because it’s pitched in C, the player can read directly from piano sheet music without transposing.
Therefore it’s reasonable to presume that the saxophone played by Jimmie and his colleague is a C-melody — except that the instrument, as drawn (rather crudely) by Herriman, is much too small, unless Jimmie is a giant of Richard Kiel proportions. Since Jimmie’s musical ability appears limited to cranking a barrel organ, I wonder whether he might really be serenading Mabel with a saxophone-shaped kazoo. Kazoos have been made in the form of miniature wind instruments; years ago I had a trombone-shaped kazoo or “bazooka” (the weapon was named after the toy instrument). I don’t know for certain if there were ever any saxophone-shaped kazoos, but there’s a kazoo museum outside of Buffalo, and if anyone has the answer, they would.
Mark says:
Thanks for the course on saxology, Paul. I always thought that the Bazooka weapon was named after Bob Burns’s instrument (the Bazooka) that was made out of gas pipes and operated something like a trombone.