A Very Rare Vintage W. Stowasser’s Söhne Verona Contrabass Saxophone

This past summer I wrote about an Italian-made W. Stowasser’s Söhne bass saxophone, that one of my readers had an opportunity to buy. Some of the information I was able to obtain about the W. Stowasser’s Söhne company, came from Scott Robinson. For over a decade, Scott has owned a W. Stowasser’s Söhne Verona contrabass saxophone.

Scott was nice enough to send me some photos of his vintage contra, and give me permission to write about the sax. I’ve been meaning to do just that, but as so often happens, I got sidetracked, and my article went onto the back burner.

Then this morning I noticed that another contrabass sax player, Randy Emerick, had posted a link on the Bass Sax Co-op, to a CNN story about Scott and his contra. This is a great piece. Enjoy…

Watching this video jiggled my memory, and I thought today was the perfect day to finally write about Scott Robinson and his vintage contrabass saxophone.

Scott’s main horn is tenor. He writes:

I’m primarily a tenor player, jazz music of all types, although I play a lot of bass and other sizes (did a whole CD on C melody called Melody from the Sky). I’ve played the contra on probably 6-8 CDs including my own Thinking Big, and others with John Pizzarelli, Randy Sandke, Hazmat Modine, Bob Belden and others. I played it in a Jackie Chan movie score, in the JVC jazz festival, and with people like Roscoe Mitchell, Maria Schneider, Bobby Short, Don Sebesky and others. It’s definitely seen some use.