One of the daily readers of my blog is looking to purchase a vintage bass saxophone. During his quest to find his “new” horn, he came across a very rare bass that currently resides in Italy.
This bass is a W. Stowasser’s Söhne¹ bass saxophone.
According to vintage sax expert Pete Hales (formerly known as Sax Pics), W. Stowasser’s Söhne² was making instruments in the same region as Kohlert, Keilwerth, and others until the end of WWII.
However, according to Scott Robinson, who owns a contrabass made by W. Stowasser’s Söhne,Verona, his contra was made in Italy by the son of Wenzel Stowasser. He believes that this particular bass saxophone is the same one he was offered a few years back by a seller in Italy. It was the identical mate to his contra. If this is the case, then this bass sax is in fact an Italian-made bass saxophone.
Although the photos that the current owner of the sax provided do not show a great deal of detail, what they do show, is a very unusual vintage bass saxophone.
NB: The original photos were extremely dark. I Photo-shopped them in order to lighten them to the point where details were visible.
My first thought when I saw the photos was that it might be a high pitched horn keyed down to low B. However, when Pete saw the photos, he offered up another possibility as well. Pete believed that it was possible that we might be looking at a bass saxophone pitched in the key of C. That’s an interesting theory. Unfortunately without a something else to compare it to in the picture, we really don’t have an idea of the saxophone’s size.
Pete offered up the following thoughts regarding this bass saxophone’s possible date of manufacturing:
I’d be willing to bet that it’s between 1915 and 1928-ish… Additionally, basses and contrabasses didn’t always have pearls (and, of course, they generally had the reduced keyed range), so that doesn’t necessarily mean really, really old. However, it does look to have a double octave key mechanism.
Regardless if the sax is low or high pitch, keyed in Bb or C, this bass requires a lot of repairs. While a high pitch bass saxophone is almost worthless, a low pitch C bass might be worth the restoration and purchase costs to the right buyer.
W. Stowasser’s Söhne was one of very, very few manufacturers who produced a contrabass saxophone. Since so little is know about the company, it is unclear how many contras they made, and of those how many survived. However, we do know of one that is still in existence. As previously mentioned, Scott Robinson owns a W. Stowasser’s Söhne, Verona contrabass saxophone.
If you are interested in finding out a bit more about the W. Stowasser’s Söhne company, there is some history about it written on the All Experts Antique Musical Instruments board. Although the original question was regarding a trumpet, the answer applies to the production of vintage saxophones as well. (It actually mentions Verona, as one of the cities where the company branched out to.)
¹Although I have seen nothing to substantiate this, I suspect the correct spelling of this company name might actually be W. Stowasser’s Söhne. I have however seen a number of different spellings for Stowasser (some of them wildly incorrect), and some of them end with an apostrophe “s”.
This would make sense, since Söhne (notice I added an umlaut, since that is the correct spelling in German) means sons, and it was Stowasser’s sons that took over the company after their father Wenzel’s death. From then on the company operated under the name W. Stowasser’s Söhne.
² Scott Robinson, owner of the W. Stowasser’s Söhne, Verona contrabass saxophone, confirmed that I did indeed get the spelling of the name correct, and that it does indeed have an umlaut over the “o” in Söhne. I’ve therefore changed all the names in this article to reflect the correct spelling. July 3, 2009
