Word: mellophonium
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...stroke; in Los Angeles. When Kenton crashed onto the West Coast jazz scene in 1941, his fortissimo "walls of brass" sound struck some critics as "sheer noise," but his popularity endured long after the demise of swing. He helped introduce Afro-Cuban rhythms to U.S. pop, invented the mellophonium, a trumpet-French horn hybrid, and wed classical music with jazz both in his own dissonant compositions (Artistry in Rhythm) and in unorthodox interpretations of Wagner and Ravel...
Touring the summer circuit, Kenton keeps his men in a state of near exhaustion that, strangely, seems to add to their cohesion and musical esprit. To the usual jazzed-up dissonances that are his musical trademark, Kenton this year has added the sound of the mellophonium, a kind of straightened French horn that he developed to fill in a range of sound that usually remains unexploited-somewhere between the trumpet and the trombone. Whipped by the rhythm section's artfully lagging beat, the buttery mellophonium sound satisfies the taste of as many as 5,000 a night...
...these days is rarer. This band is one of the best Kenton ever put together. The instrumentation is unique even for one of popular music's most tireless experimenters: no strings, generous contingents of trumpets, trombones, saxes, and an instrument of Kenton's own invention -the mellophonium, midway between trumpet and trombone. The result is as smooth as butter, whipped by Kenton's artfully lagging beat and caressing tone in ballads like Moonlight in Vermont...
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