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The Baritone and other Saxophones 107
He performed a dually brilliant function, lending much o£ the character inherent in the tonal texture of the reed team, as well as providing solos that were compellingly personal Carney's big sound on the baritone bore much the same relationship to the efforts o£ later exponents as the Coleman Hawkins quality on tenor did to the less rigorous tenor men of later years.
What seemed at first like an anti-trust action aimed at Carney and his baritone began when the monopoly was at last broken, first by Jock Carruthers of the Lunceford band and Jack Washington with Basic, and by Ernie Caceres, a capable swing-era clarinetist who doubled on baritone in the bands of Bobby Hackett, Jack Teagarden, and Glenn Miller. But there was no inherently new approach to the instrument until the arrival of Serge Chaloff, a young Bostonian who, at 21, made the imprint of his modernist-oriented horn in the Boyd Raeburn and Georgie Auld bands and was revealed, in a series of small combo records, as the first bop baritone saxophonist. Two years later, in 1947, Chaloff earned national prominence in the Woody Herman band, and by 1949 he was able to dislodge Carney from the official throne he had held for so many years, winning the Down Beat and Metronome polls. (Chaloff died in July 1957.)
Established not long after Chaloff as baritone men were Leo Parker and Cecil Payne. The latter, heard first on alto sax, was featured with Gillespie on baritone (1946-9), playing a slightly brusquer and no less eloquent reflection of Charlie Parker's influence. The most independent contemporary baritone saxophonist is Gerry Mulligan, whose career could be compared with that of a painter who goes through a cubist period before taking up portraiture. In his early associations with such bop groups as Kai Winding's and Chubby Jackson's, Mulligan appeared to be using the same canvas as Serge Chaloff; later it became evident that he was on display in an entirely different wing of the Museum of Modern Art. Using a pianoless combo as his setting, Mulligan, in whom a strong sense of humor frequently becomes evident, offered a fascinating pastiche of mainstream, quasi-bop and Dixieland-modern.
On the West Coast, great progress in modern baritone was made by 27-year-old Bob Gordon shortly before his death in |
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