The Saxophone Colossus

Carnegie Hall first opened its doors in April of 1891, and with its opening came a flush of musicians all hoping to land themselves in the court of the industrial king who lent his name to the venue. After its opening performance on May 5th of the same year, all manner of composers and conductors, pianists and pit-musicians were eager to make themselves known to the elite of early 20th century Manhattan, who were, and would continue to be for the rest of the city’s history, the elites of the elites; the neo-Romans of the expanding American Empire. Each season, two-hundred performances were encased in the walls of Carnegie Hall, and the beats and chords from the orchestras would echo off the venue’s polished white and gold interior chamber, reverberating with enough soul and fire and fury and rhythm that led to a rumor that the bones of Bach had been used in the architecture to give support (to both the building and the performers). Of course, this was what the hall would go on to become, and during its formative years, as most would expect, it was fairly limited in scope of sound. While the classical melodies boomed and echoed with power and grace, Carnegie Hall served as a grand symbol of triumph of the form.
It was a place for the wealthy and the classically trained, perfectly representing Andrew Carnegie himself; Carnegie was a man of great ambition and, through intelligence and determination, transformed himself into a living argument for the glory of capitalism. Carnegie was an immigrant of Scottish descent, and had risen himself through impossible odds to become one of the richest men in the world, and the purest example of a businessman that America could offer. Carnegie Hall, similarly, was a means of expressing this feat through sounds that could not be put into words, for Carnegie’s accomplishment was too glorious. But, however much this could irritate the foundation of Carnegie Hall, it could not diminish the power of the music. The music was too much for argument. The music was the best in the world, and continued that way for seventeen years, and the echoes still rang in the corridors of the hall, resonating a power that could strike at the soul of any man, and give him the ambition, tenacity, and perhaps even a small amount of the raw misanthropy that lay deep down in the hearts of men like Andrew Carnegie. What the hall was waiting for was someone who could wash away that legacy. What the hall, and by extension all of New York City was waiting for was an artist who would redefine everything they expected from the venue.
And then, on February 29th of 1908, there came Sammy Carter (whose real name was Shmuel Kurtz. but chose to hide his Jewish background) and his orchestra, the Renaissance, to Carnegie Hall. The anticipation had circulated for several months, as statements about Carter’s orchestra had noted that he was undergoing the most unusual experiment in the music of New York City. Carter had long embraced the traditions of classical music, but, somewhere along the way, he had found that it had grown somehow stagnant and had lost a great deal of its original passion. This was when Carter’s brilliant revelation came to him, when he found the idea in his mind that would make him famous across the nation for one night. He was to combine classical music with the music the blacks of Harlem played. How Carter came to be classically trained remains a mystery to this day, as many have attempted to learn how his family came to wealth while being Jewish immigrants. His father was believed to have been a banker, but in actuality was a poster-maker, designing propaganda to be shipped to the south in the wake of reconstruction. Carter himself had never been concerned about money, as his education was prestigious and his musicians followed him to the ends of the Earth.
When Carter and his orchestra first appeared in Carnegie Hall, reactions ranged from amusement to disdain. Not only had Carter’s idea given him a reputation as both a genius and a madman, but his orchestra was nearly halfway made up of blacks, only a few of whom had even come from Harlem, with most having saved up their pennies to move to the North, where Carter had discovered them one at a time. The night of the performance has since become the stuff of legend. All the patrons sat in their seats, some eager for a new, exciting form of concert music that would take the city into a new age, while others awaited a pure humiliation on Carter’s part. The members of the Renaissance then took their seats, bringing on all of their various brasses and winds, as the audience attempted to contain their laughter over the orchestra’s unorthodox arrangement of instruments. There were so many brasses that the auditorium shown with the same hue and fluidity of urine, and the lack of any strings coupled with a single drum-set ensured the audience that their greatest fears were indeed on the horizon: this was to be a percussive evening of unrelenting amounts of harsh noise, that would last for nearly three hours, and would result in severe migraines for New York’s wealthiest in the morning. Then, Sammy Carter took to the stage, bowed to the audience, and signaled the Renaissance to commence.
For the first the first half hour, there was nothing but the piano, and this surprised a crowd expecting unrelenting noise. The man on the piano was Andre Piotr, a Russian immigrant who did not know a single word of English, a situation that led to Sammy Carter’s frustration many times. At 91-years-old, Piotr was, albeit unofficially, the oldest performer at Carnegie Hall at the time. Despite his age, Piotr had maintained a massive head of mangy black hair, with a beard so long it went to knees, resulting in Carter having to tie it up with rubber bands before each performance to keep the hair off the keys, as well as to ensure that the audience did not mistake Piotr for a Neanderthal. Carter’s efforts to groom Piotr’s wild features into some amount of sophistication were in vain, and, for years afterward, the rumor still persisted that Rasputin had been a concert pianist before he destroyed the Romanovs. His true legacy, however, was his piano work, which opened the legendary show and gave the audience the first sample of what they were in for. Although they didn’t realize it at the time, the Russian was actually the most percussive of all players in the Renaissance, pounding his instrument with all the might that an old man’s fingers could (which was far greater than one might expect), and creating a firm, loud, yet still graceful and intricate opener for the rest of the performance.
The rest of the orchestra came in as soon as Piotr looked as though his fingers would melt off from turning too red. The collective of musicians had trained for the better part of a year to make sure they did not overpower the listener after the fury of Andre Piotr, implementing a then-revolutionary call-and-response style between the first row and the back row, while those in the middle carried on the rhythm with the drummer keeping steady for the continuation of the night. For an hour the Renaissance amazed the audience with new methods, constantly switching up styles and exceeding expectations. The drummer himself, Charlie Brooklyn, named after the bridge he was born under, assisted. Brooklyn was as orderly and controlled as the finest desk-worker, but with enough energy to fuel a bomb of his own. And, indeed, when his first snare echoed in the auditorium, New York’s wealthiest were in for a hell of a night. Brooklyn brought to the Renaissance the control they needed to make their music incredible. At every moment they could have played one note, another, even more effective one, stood in its place, and tore down the expected patterns and standards that the patrons of Carnegie Hall had taken to heart. Assisted by Brooklyn’s changing beats, the orchestra carried on storming, and rolled on with impossible ease. This was their night to redefine not only Carnegie Hall but all of New York, and they weren’t slowing down.
At two and a half hours into the performance, the audience had been overwhelmed by the prowess and power of Sammy Carter and the Renaissance. And then came the build. Charlie Brooklyn began a roll on his snare drum that built so fast and so quiet that it infused itself onto the pulses of all in the hall, while the middle rhythm section row syncopated with him, backing up the long bursts of sound coming from the front and back, as they switched off on the fly to the point where even they had lost track of who was playing at every moment. The build continued and rolled on, as the music grew louder and more powerful, and Sammy Carter kept them going and going and going until their faces had turned red and their hands grown numb. And it built and built and built to a crescendo of booming brass and thunderous uproar of melody, stretched out to a deafening roar that lasted a small eternity. And as the boom grew to its highest and loudest point, thundering so that even those outside the hall could hear it died, and only one thing remained in its place.
A saxophone bellowed out where all the others had died, and stretched out its notes to descend. The saxophonist stood up, and played a solo that took the experience from revolutionary, to something else entirely that words could not describe. The saxophonist, a tall black man of nineteen years, played his miracle instrument for all of New York to hear. To sum up the performance in notes and dynamics was to give it too little credit. It was slower and gentler than anything that had come before it, but impossibly loud and noisy if you listened hard enough. As the player continued to blow into his instrument, it was heard throughout the city. Down by the docks where the seamen arrived it vibrated through the water, and brought all ships that could hear it back to land. In the lower boroughs, the animals fell quiet, and hugged the ground to feel the pulse of the saxophone. On the construction sites in midtown, the sound echoed along the bars and scaffolds where all the night workers could hear it, and all of them promptly stopped their work and sat down on the framework, looking over the city and up at the half moon.
Back in the hall, after an hour of playing, Clarence Christopher drew his solo to a close, and the Renaissance took their part in wrapping up with the final movement. The audience sat for twenty minutes, and then applauded for another hour.
Sammy Carter’s body was found in his apartment three weeks later, after the smell had carried over to the neighbors. By some phantasmagorical means, his body had decayed down to the earliest sightings of his white bones.
For the next three years Clarence Christopher was the most talked-about man in Manhattan. After Sammy Carter had died, the Renaissance had dissolved, scattering its members across the five boroughs, with mixed results among their fortunes (Charlie Brooklyn continued to play as a session musician until retiring in 1968, while Andre Piotr had left the orchestra after the Carnegie Hall performance and died of natural causes the very next day in his apartment). It was Christopher who continued on to carve out a pronounced impression in New York City history, performing across Manhattan and Queens for months following the performance. His reputation was always preceded by his legendary Carnegie Hall solo, something he would spend the rest of his life trying to recapture.
While the art of the man who would go on to be called “The Jazz Spider” was what would create his legacy, his personal life was an area often overlooked yet equally fascinating. Clarence had grown up in New York City, though his exact home area remains a mystery. His father had been killed at the hands of corrupt police officers shortly before he was born, and Clarence’s mother Bernadette had often sent him out to Midtown in order to play on his harmonica for spare change. After the death of his mother at age 11, he had managed to save up a small amount money for himself (an act would which often result in fierce beatings from Bernadette Christopher) that kept him from going hungry on the streets of early 20th century Manhattan. It was when Clarence was 15 that Sammy Carter located him after hearing stories about a gifted street performer, and was invited into his early quartet. At the time the quartet consisted of Clarence, Charlie Brooklyn, Carter himself on piano, and an unidentified bass player who left around the time more and more members started to transform the quartet into a full-on orchestra.
Carter’s relationship with the young Clarence Christopher was a uniquely close one in the Renaissance. Charlie Brooklyn has said, “I never did get to know Clarence very well. In fact, he always did come across like he was very self-absorbed. But the one guy he would talk to, and I mean pour everything to, was Sammy. Sammy and Clarence would just always be talking, discussing the music, they were like brothers that always were like that. Like they knew each other all their lives.” Several other members of the orchestra have supported Brooklyn’s claim about Christopher being anti-social. On one occasion, it has been told that Christopher was harassed by another bandmate, the trumpeter Bobby Frank. When Frank had alluded to the then teenage boy’s virginity, a vicious argument broke out between the two, which culminated in Frank commenting on the size of Christopher’s penis. Later that day, on the way home from rehearsal, Frank was assaulted by Christopher in an alley, who had followed him for 20 blocks and beat his face until his nose broken using the saxophone case he had been given by Carter.
For whatever kind of man Clarence Christopher was offstage, when he was onstage he would seemingly evolve. The performer onstage was something much more than “young black man growing up in New York at the turn of the century.” There was something about Clarence Christopher’s music that seemed to naturally appeal to just about every inhabitant of New York; the way it could be so mathematical, always keep his notes and rolls ordered down to the smallest detail and never going in the wrong direction or holding out a note for too long; yet it never came across as perfunctory either. A phrase attributed to many talented performers was the gift of having soul, but Clarence Christopher’s music itself seemed to have some sort of pulsating entity to it. Perhaps it was the universality of his saxophone that could seem to communicate a clear message to everyone who heard it, and spoke with lucidity and grace. For Clarence Christopher, the saxophone was his voice, and he spoke the language of the Tower of Babel. And when he spoke he said the most extraordinary and inspiring things, and no one could ignore the New York City gospel.
Word of Christopher’s skill stretched out beyond the city, and in 1911, the man with a voice of a city began touring nationally, generating anticipation among musical hubs and appreciators of early jazz. The tour was set up with Christopher and his band, called the Solomon quartet, and they set out in May of that year, heading to Boston for Christopher’s time performing outside of New York. It was a performance that he was never to appear at. After settling into the hotel, Christopher left to cash in his check (the owners of the venue had agreed to pay him in advance). At an undisclosed bank in the south of Boston, Clarence Christopher was waiting in line, still carrying his saxophone case, when an amateur bank robber by the name of Corley Conroy stormed into the bank. Conroy had been working at a tiles factory up until the previous day, when two of his fingers had been severed in an accident. The foreman had refused Conroy’s attempts to speak with the managers, and Conroy was fired without benefits for insulting a superior. Conroy had taken to bank robbery rather hastily.
After shaking down the teller and several customers, Conroy was making his exit when something hard collided with the back of his head. Conroy fell over and spun around to see Clarence Christopher standing over him with his saxophone case held above his head, staring angrily down at him. Reacting quickly, Conroy took his pistol and aimed it at Christopher’s face. He fired. After Conroy had picked himself up and run out of the bank with several police officers in pursuit, the other customers of the bank got up to see Clarence Christopher clutching the area where his left eye had once been, which was now overflowing with blood. Then, Christopher, breathing heavily and still holding on to his saxophone case, announced to the bank, “Fuck this town. I’m gettin’ myself back home.”
And with that, Clarence Christopher stormed out of the bank, still holding his bloody eye socket. He never made his appearance at the Boston venue, or returned to the hotel to collect his luggage. The Solomon quartet returned to New York to find him, but after six years was declared dead by the New York City Police Department. Clarence Christopher had sunken into the city that he had once held in the palm of his hand, and vanished from history itself.
Jonathan Shapiro,Age 18 Grade 12, Saint Ann’s School, Honorable Mention