Mulo Francel - The Melody Sax (CD)

Release Date: 04/21/23

Groove and fresh timbres of Jazz Guitar, Fender Rhodes Piano, Bass and Drums. And in the middle of it all: The 100 year old C-Melody Saxophone!

The Roaring Twenties. The heyday of art, culture, science and social life. Radio, shows, parties, movies and the first million hits in music history. Jazz moved up the Mississippi and now conquers the metropolises of America with energetic rhythms and cheerful melodies. In the process, the saxophone is gaining more and more importance as an instrument. Fascinated by the music of that era, saxophonist Mulo Francel, who otherwise plays with the band Quadro Nuevo, took on a challenge: Transferring the smile of the music of that time into a modern context. With a team of younger musicians, some of whom are still in their 20s themselves. With an instrument that was widely used in the popular music of the 1920s and suddenly disappeared forever. The C-Melody saxophone is characterized by a frivolous sound. Almost circus-like, with a positive timbre. The advantage of this saxophone variant was that many amateurs who played other instruments in C tuning (piano, flute, violin, organ ...) could now simply use their old sheet music for the saxophone, which had become fashionable. And sheet music was expensive in those days.
Thousands wanted and could afford this instrument as a small luxury due to the economic boom, and so the C-Melodies soon piled up as a Christmas bestseller under the Christmas trees. Production of C-Melody saxophones reached its peak in 1923 in Elkhart, Indiana. These horns were made with the same know-how of those years as their Bb imd Eb tuned relatives.
Mulo Francel is one of the few saxophonists who still plays this instrument masterfully today. He bought his silver C-Melody, built in 1923 by the American company Conn, for $125 at a New York flea market. It has been on almost every Quadro Nuevo album from the beginning and sang the Luna Rossa on the band's first recordings as early as 1997.