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Seventy-Eights to CD dot com featuring the Sounds on CD Savoy Catalogue |
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This page contains some photos of personal interest that you may enjoy.
As a clarinetist, you might ask why I am leading off my photo gallery with a trumpet. The reason is that this is an exceptional instrument. I've had this trumpet for about 35 years, and it has never really been playable because it requires a smaller mouthpiece shank than is commonly available. Through the kind assistance of Dr. Edward Tarr (www.tarr-online.de), have obtained an exact copy, custom made by Egger Instruments, of the mouthpiece that Tarr uses to perform on a trumpet similar to mine. Moreover, Dr. Tarr's mouthpiece is itself an exact copy of one used by Earnest Hall and now in a London museum. Earnest Hall was the first principal trumpet of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Hall may be seen playing a similar instrument in an article "The BBC Symphony Orchestra Trumpet Section," by Martin Hurrell.
The new mouthpiece is shown below (right) along with the instrument's leadpipe extension. It turns out that the receiver was, unexpectedly, too small for the mouthpiece shank; so a new custom lead pipe has been made Eggers in Switzerland. I'm shown below playing the complete instrument.
| Mahillon Bb trumpet (early 1900's) | Mahillon/Hall/Tarr Mouthpiece copy and original leadpipe |
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The photo below is of my entire set of clarinets. From left to right:
My clarinet-playing activities include the Green Valley Concert Band, in which I play Bb and Eb soprano clarinets. I play all the harmony clarinets, Eb soprano, F basset horn, Eb alto and Bb bass, in a clarinet choir sponsored by the Desert Hills Lutheran Church in Green Valley AZ. I also do arrangements and transcriptions for the clarinet choir. I also perform church music, in which I occasionally play the C and A clarinets. Although the name "Amati" of the C clarinet, made in the Czech Republic, does not rank among the top brands like Buffet and Leblanc, this clarinet was recently loaned to a professional player who played it in the Tucson Symphony and the Tucson Pops, and who had nothing but praise for the instrument.
After a fifteen-year break, I decided to come out of the closet as a wanna-be horn player. I sold my double horn years ago, and recently acquired the horn pictured below. It is an F. E. Olds Ambassador model single horn in Bb. It dates from about 1953, and was made in Los Angeles, before Olds moved their manufacturing to Fullerton CA. This is a very nice playing horn, although the single-horn fingerings and the absence of several low notes took getting used to.
Well, I got so serious about horn playing that I needed another pro-quality horn. So I went to Wichita Band Instruments Co., Inc. to try out a half dozen horns and ended up trading in my basset horn on a new Holton Merker Model H276 seen below.
