R.I.P. Terry Stibal

Yesterday morning myself and the other Admin staff on the Woodwind Forum (WF) found out that we lost one of our most popular and cherished Content Experts. Terry Stibal—AKA SOTSDO in the online saxophone world—passed away from ALS a few weeks ago.

We couldn’t locate an obituary for Terry, and after to speaking to his wife, I understood why: he didn’t want one. Joyce did however want us to spread the word to the online musical community, since she had no way of reaching them. To that end, Jim Glass posted the following obit both on the WF and SOTW:

It is with sadness that I report the death of our friend Terry Lynn Stibal (November 7, 1949 – July 13, 2015). He did not want a obituary but I think he will allow us this notice. Terry was an esteemed moderator for the Woodwind Forum. He was respected for his musical knowledge, dry sense of humor, and keen interest in history. You can read a number of his music-related blog posts here.

From 2002 till 2015 Terry fronted a Vegas-style orchestra with seventeen musicians and four vocalists, ran a specialized ten piece R&B, Rat Pack, Classic Rock and Broadway groups for smaller venues, restaurant, club and private engagements.

From July 1969 till December 2008 he was the assistant area director for the USDL, OSHA, HSAO in Houston TX area and surrounding TX coastal counties, he supervised enforcement of Federal safety and health laws at both the administrative and judicial levels. Managed extensive and complex fatality and catastrophe investigations in the petrochemical, general industrial, maritime and construction industry environments.

Source: Woodwind Forum & Sax on the Web

As I mentioned at the top, Terry was one of the Content Experts on the Woodwind Forum. His advice was always sage and extensive, while his breadth and depth of knowledge about all things musical was something he never tired of sharing whenever someone asked him a question. He was one of our post popular Content Experts, and earned among the most “Thanks” from our members for his answers. He will certainly be missed.

Terry Stibal had an interesting theory about bass saxophones

Terry also wrote article-length posts that made you think. For me, his most thought-provoking was the one he wrote on February 18, 2008, and was about bass saxophones.

Where are they now?

I’ve aired out this particular issue before elsewhere, but it probably deserves repeating here for some new eyes and ears:

Where did all the bass saxophones go, and what did you do with them?

Back in the good old days, there were a lot of bass saxes made, for the most part by the minions of Colonel Conn. Sure, there were a lot more alto and tenors, but the horns were there in the day, and they were large objects that were not capable of being lost through a crack in the floor or behind the bleachers.

And, then…well, mostly they just went away. “As scarce as hen’s teeth” is appropriate these days, and their presence (or lack of same) over the past half century or so has occasionally been a cause for comment.

Look, I know that tastes change. The day of a tuba or a banjo in a “big band’ is long gone, and saxophone quintets aren’t very common. So, not seeing them in performance situations is understandable. But, I’m not talking about that at all.

Just where have they all gone? For those who are relatively young and lead a sheltered life, a bass saxophone isn’t easy to ignore. The term “coffin” can literally be applied to a bass saxophone case. Yet, there are so few out there to be found.

For many years, I played in a variety of musical situations at Washington University in St. Louis MO. That was a school had both money and some eclectic tastes. Their instrument room was an interesting place. Things like an F alto sax, a Heckel contra-bassoon (one made back in the days when they actually looked like a bassoon), a pair of basset horns (even though one was missing a neck), and just about every form of brass instrument known to mankind.

But, one thing that I never found was a bass saxophone. And this at a school which never met a helicorn that it didn’t like. Why?

I put out and out theft out of the picture. It’s hard to spirit one off with anything short of a pickup truck, to begin with. And, I give college students a bit more credit for honesty than that.

And, although some of them smell like they have just died, we know that they are not alive and that they didn’t walk off of their own accord.

So, the question remains, where did they all go?

To start with, some will claim that there weren’t that many of them in the first place. To this, I say “Bosh!” And, I offer up some “proof”, as good as anything else that can be offered.

My parents, between them, attended three Saint Louis (MO) public high schools between them during the mid-1930’s. While Dad’s family didn’t go for such frivolity as yearbooks (or, as my aged mother still calls them, “annuals”) Mother’s bought them all.

In all three school’s annuals, there is the inconvenient truth of a bass saxophone (along with a goodly number of metal clarinets), proudly displayed in the back rows of the formal portraits. Three basses (and two of them are unmistakably different horns, due to dent patterns and the like) in three different high schools.

The three schools in question (all but one of which have long been shuttered) were about one-seventh of the total high schools in metro Saint Louis at the time. And, one of them was known as being a school that was “poor” compared to the other two – something borne out by the larger proportion of metal clarinets that show up in the portrait.

So, let’s run the numbers here. Let’s say that one-third of the urban high schools passed out the dosh sufficient to pick up a bass saxophone. In very round figures, that would indicate that there were at least a thousand or so such instruments in high schools at one point or another. Take that figure and double it to account for “professional” use horns. Whether you go this route, or attempt to tally things up through serial numbers and the like, assuming a bass saxophone universe of something like two thousand here in the US is not all that unreasonable.

So, where did they all go? In those three schools in Saint Louis (all of which were open during the days of my youth), they were no longer there. Nor were they in any of the other schools at which I had access to the horns.

So, where did they all go? World War II scrap drives are my pet theory. The parts weren’t being written for them any longer, they were just sitting there taking up space, and they were mostly made of copper alloy, and – presto! – 75 mm shell casings.

But, it’s only a theory. It would be nice to back it up with both realistic production figures and a realistic understanding of where they all went.

I couldn’t let this go unchallenged. A few weeks after starting this weblog, Terry’s pet theory inspired this comedic response from me: An Inconvenient Truth About Selmer Mark VI Saxophones.

R.I.P. Terry Stibal. You are missed.