Search - Six Brown Brothers :: Broadway's Favorite Clowns

The present compact disc shows the Five and Six Brown Brothers, the Canadian siblings who became the most famous and successful of the many pioneers who helped popularize the saxophone in North America, from a different angle than Archeophone's first compilation of their recordings, Those Moaning Saxophones (ARCH 6002). That collection stressed the Browns' output of rags, one-steps, and popular songs to draw a portrait of them leading the vanguard of the saxophone craze that spread from the United States to the rest of the affluent world in the 1910s, and it followed them to their last recording from 1927. The selections on this new collection paint a more rounded likeness of their stage repertoire, from marches and waltzes to oriental one-steps, an habanera, and an operatic transcription. Rags are represented as well, however, including "Twelfth Street Rag," one of the group's hottest sides. The playlist once again begins in 1911, with all four of the Five Brown Brothers' very rare cylinder recordings for the United States Phonograph Company, and it ends with their final Emerson recording, from 1920. At the midpoint, it offers Fred Brown's four mystery-shrouded solo saxophone recordings.