If you love bass saxophones, and if you’re reading this, the odds are good that you at least know what a bass sax is, then you owe it to yourself to listen to the amazing duelling bass work performed by the 2 bass sax players of the Uptown Lowdown Jazz Band from Seattle.
The band’s rendition of Since My Best Gal Turned Me Down, features absolute insane bass calisthenics, covering the full range of those vintage horns, for nearly 7 minutes. Of those 7 minutes, 3 are spent soloing or duelling with each other. (I just want to know where the portable oxygen tanks were hidden for after the show. 
If that had been me on stage performing, I’d have been hooked up during the performance, never mind after!) 
Hope you enjoy the YouTube video. (I will try to get a YouTube plugin or widget put in ASAP, but I figure might as well wait until we do the upgrade to the content management system in the next week or two.)
Anything above Eb3 on one of those vintage basses would be altissimo. There are no published fingering charts “out there”, but we have all experimented & shared our findings on the Bass Sax Co-op. I could tell you what they are, but then I’d have to kill you. 😉
Seriously, when I first established my website, I was sent a PDF chart of altissimo fingerings for bass sax from someone. (I honestly don’t even remember from whom anymore.) There was a very strict condition however, and that was that I never publish the chart.
At the time, my site was one of only 3 on the ‘Net that was specific to bass saxes. (Don’t forget, that was early days of the Internet still in 2000, so bass-specific information was still hard to come by.)
To this day, I have lived up to that promise of not publishing the chart, and will continue to do so. I use the fingerings, and they do work really well.
The chart was also crucial in helping me develop my own fingerings along the way. If I hadn’t have had the chart, I would have found the fingerings eventually, but the chart made everything so much easier, especially in the beginning.
Very cloak and dagger stuff. The vintage bass sax world is full of intrigue. 😯
Are there “fake” fingerings for high E and F when the palm keys are missing? It sounded like one of the two basses was into that range, or even the low altissimo. I’m just curious how one would play in that region without the appropriate keys.