Embiggened Saxomophone
Jul. 16th, 2007 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnOr, actually, not embiggened, just naturally very large indeed, but how often do you get to use the word 'embiggened', let alone misuse it...
My mother is in the throes of moving house, and has discovered an alarming amount of random stuff lurking in her cupboards. As always, her reaction is to try to palm it off on anyone passing, which in this case happened to be me & philmophlegm, invited to take away the monstrous instrument and anything else that should take our fancy (we also left with 2 large bags of books, and she was clearly disappointed by our self-restraint).
I was rather surprised to discover that she still had not only my father's baritone saxophone (which has been waiting to be dealt with since he died in 1985), but also his tenor sax and my old bass clarinet, all lurking in a cupboard. A bass clarinet is frankly not a lot of use unless you do an awful lot of orchestral clarinet playing, and the tenor, we discovered this weekend, really needs a major overhaul: some of the springs are stuck and I think it probably needs new pads too, and it wasn't a very good instrument to start with.
But The Barry (as it was always known in our house) is still in lovely order: it is a Selmer, and a thing of beauty, that he bought brand new out of the proceeds of about 2 years busking in pubs, if I remember correctly.
I have always lusted after it, even though I cannot really play it (I used to play alto sax a bit, and clarinet with rather more skill although little flair, but have never really tried to play something that large, in the key of E flat). So, now I own it. I shall have to get a 'your first baritone Saxophone' book - if such a thing exists.
Another thing she had dug out was a small stained glass window, with a sort of coat of arms thing incorporating a griffin and the mysterious word 'Bacharach' on it. We think this must be something to do with my great-grandfather or possibly his father, who were a stained glass making family in London, but rather tragically, we don't know if this was a family heirloom or just a piece of work that was never paid for or delivered, and has just hung about the place for the past eighty-odd years.
It was wrapped in 1980's newspaper, which I think must date from the time when my grandparents moved down to Devon, but who knows where it came from before that. *mystery*.
On Friday, some git stole my credit card details and used them to pay for a bunch of things, but luckily my bank spotted it (perhaps because I was in a petshop paying for cat food at the same time as supposedly I was paying Deviantart 150 quid...)
My mother is in the throes of moving house, and has discovered an alarming amount of random stuff lurking in her cupboards. As always, her reaction is to try to palm it off on anyone passing, which in this case happened to be me & philmophlegm, invited to take away the monstrous instrument and anything else that should take our fancy (we also left with 2 large bags of books, and she was clearly disappointed by our self-restraint).
I was rather surprised to discover that she still had not only my father's baritone saxophone (which has been waiting to be dealt with since he died in 1985), but also his tenor sax and my old bass clarinet, all lurking in a cupboard. A bass clarinet is frankly not a lot of use unless you do an awful lot of orchestral clarinet playing, and the tenor, we discovered this weekend, really needs a major overhaul: some of the springs are stuck and I think it probably needs new pads too, and it wasn't a very good instrument to start with.
But The Barry (as it was always known in our house) is still in lovely order: it is a Selmer, and a thing of beauty, that he bought brand new out of the proceeds of about 2 years busking in pubs, if I remember correctly.
I have always lusted after it, even though I cannot really play it (I used to play alto sax a bit, and clarinet with rather more skill although little flair, but have never really tried to play something that large, in the key of E flat). So, now I own it. I shall have to get a 'your first baritone Saxophone' book - if such a thing exists.
Another thing she had dug out was a small stained glass window, with a sort of coat of arms thing incorporating a griffin and the mysterious word 'Bacharach' on it. We think this must be something to do with my great-grandfather or possibly his father, who were a stained glass making family in London, but rather tragically, we don't know if this was a family heirloom or just a piece of work that was never paid for or delivered, and has just hung about the place for the past eighty-odd years.
It was wrapped in 1980's newspaper, which I think must date from the time when my grandparents moved down to Devon, but who knows where it came from before that. *mystery*.
On Friday, some git stole my credit card details and used them to pay for a bunch of things, but luckily my bank spotted it (perhaps because I was in a petshop paying for cat food at the same time as supposedly I was paying Deviantart 150 quid...)
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-18 01:00 pm (UTC)To be fair, she had managed to offload the alto sax, the drums, all the weird percussion and all 4 of the soprano saxes. At least - I think she has. She didn't mention them. Oh lord, I bet they are all still lurking somewhere where she hasn't come across them yet....
There was a spare clarinet. Only a plastic one though.