It’s the instrument of choice for everyone from Sonny Rollins to Kamasi Washington, but what makes the Selmer Mark VI such a mythic sax?

Sonny Rollins, one of the greatest living practitioners of jazz, bought the saxophone he still uses today on West 48th Street in Manhattan in the 1970s. Back then, the small block was dotted with so many instrument sales and repair stores that it earned the title Music Street. Rollins used to browse those shops, trying out reeds, mouthpieces, and horns, always on the lookout for a better sound, until one day he found a used saxophone he liked—a model made by the French company Henri Selmer Paris called the Mark VI—and took it home. Rollins calls it his “number one horn.” It hasn’t left his side since.

The 85-year-old is among many jazz giants who have used the Mark VI as their saxophone of choice, including Dexter Gordon, Ornette Coleman, Joe Henderson, Benny Golson, and Wayne Shorter. The list goes on. John Coltrane played one to record his spiritual 1965 opus A Love Supreme, which fully showcases the tenor player’s towering sound.

Due in no small part to these famous pairings, the Mark VI has achieved a legendary status amongst jazz aficionados and musicians. And it’s still the go-to horn for many professional players. But getting one is not as easy as it used to be. Though the Selmer company is still up and running, the Mark VI hasn’t been made since 1974. And though the number of Mark VIs the company produced during the 20 years it made the horn has kept them in wide circulation, prices have surged, often to more than $10,000. Musicians’ preferences are not a science, they are deeply personal appraisals mixed with a little bit of superstition. You need a wand to make magic; a stick won’t do. But what is it about this particular saxophone that makes it so great?

The Selmer Mark VI and its reign emerged from the chaos of World War II. While quality saxophones made by domestic manufacturers were plentiful in the United States in the swing era of the ’20s and ’30s, production fell steeply during the war. Measures instituted by the federal government in the early ’40s limited the amount of elements like copper, iron, zinc, and steel that manufacturers could put in any instrument to 10 percent. Brass—an alloy of copper and zinc, and the main component of most saxophones—was thus restricted as well. The musical instrument industry, like so many others, was brought to a virtual halt.

 Though some factories secured contracts to produce instruments for military bands, others were converted for direct wartime uses. Conn and Buescher, two of the larger producers of American saxophones, made altimeters for military planes. Another producer, King, assembled radar tuners, antennas, and proximity fuses. The workforce was also depleted by the war’s massive conscription effort. 

In Nazi-occupied France, Selmer did not emerge unscathed either. The son of one of the company’s main designers, Frédéric Lefevre, who was being groomed to run the main plant, was murdered by machine gunners, according to a letter from George Bundy, president of the company’s American affiliate. Bundy describes Selmer’s facilities operating at about 60 percent of their normal output amidst material shortages. Still, its plants in Paris, Mantes, and Normandy were largely unharmed; some blown-out windows here and there, but much better off than the instrument factories in a more heavily-damaged London.

Though the front lines were far from U.S. soil, the production of quality saxes in the States never fully recovered in the years after the war. Matt Stohrer, a vintage saxophone repairman in North Carolina, says the quality of American saxophones declined after producers began gearing their lines toward student musicians. “You could walk into a store in 1936 and see horns that all played well, had different ideas, and were extremely well-made,” Stohrer says. “But when 1954 hit, there were only two American manufacturers making professional-level saxophones at any great number in quality that compared to pre-war times: King and Martin.”

Selmer began selling Mark VI’s for the first time that same year. The horns, which were designed for classical players, sold for about $500 when they were released, a hefty price that the company said was merited by the instrument’s superiority. The saxophones were made at the factory in Mantes, outside Paris; some were also assembled in Elkhart, Indiana at the headquarters of the company’s American affiliate.

Selmer, which started in 1885 making reeds and mouthpieces, was well-poised to dominate the market. It was in many ways the heir to the maker of the original saxophone, having purchased the workshops of the instrument’s inventor, Adolphe Sax, in 1929. It released a groundbreaking horn in 1936, the Balanced Action, which it tweaked a few years later into a model called the Super Balanced Action. 

In addition to its craftsmanship, the Balanced Action was designed with changes that made the horn much easier to play. “It was a paradigm shift in the way saxophones were manufactured,” says Mark Overton, the owner of Saxquest, a saxophone emporium in St. Louis, and founder of saxophone.org, a lively message board and information resource for sax freaks. The upper and lower key registers, for the left and right hands, were offset about 30 degrees apart, allowing for a more relaxed pose and dexterity on the keys. “Those horns are sublime,” says Stohrer. “The Balanced Action is where someone made the work of art for the first time. The Mark VI is an upgrade—the fine tuning.”

But it wasn’t just the horn’s superior engineering. The Mark VI found its way into the hands of many of the era’s hottest musicians. Stohrer thinks differences in the racial attitudes in France—Paris was a haven for black artists and writers like James Baldwin at the time—may have played a role. “The French didn’t give a shit about what color your skin was, not like we did,” Stohrer says.

The Mark VI’s allure was also enhanced by the timing of its release. The instrument, made between 1954 and 1974, had a production run that coincided almost perfectly with the golden era of modern jazz, as the genre moved away from the sound of bebop and big bands to one that favored smaller groups playing in clubs and on records. “Musicians were looking for more powerful and punchy stuff,” says Stohrer. “They didn’t want to sound like a Victrola or a big band. The required technical facility was high.”

It was the time of tenor giants, many of whom posed with their horns on albums: Coltrane’s Blue Train, Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus, Hank Mobley’s Soul Station. Recording technology and home audio systems had also improved to fully showcase the powerful sounds of the saxophone. 

Though they were hand-crafted, Selmer also produced the Mark VIs in volume, making between 150,000 and 200,000 of them, a majority of which are believed to be around today.

Though many musicians acknowledge that other vintage horns have their strengths, the Mark VI’s reputation has never been supplanted in terms of its all-around sound and durability.  “The old Martins, Kings, and Conns have a little bit of a step on Selmer in terms of tone, but their mechanics suck,” says Kamasi Washington, the breakout 35-year-old tenor player and Kendrick Lamar collaborator who released his the acclaimed album The Epic last year. “There’s no horn that has the combination of mechanics and tone like the Mark VI.”

Washington’s Mark VI, made in 1969, was originally his father’s. When he was asked to switch from alto to tenor one day in high school he just took his dad’s instrument without telling him and lugged it to class the next day. “When I got home, my dad had this pale look on his face,” Washington recalls. “He was so distraught. He thought something happened to his horn.” 

Washington, whose musician father Rickey buys and sells horns, says he often finds himself in the middle of saxophone debates between his father and friend, another Lamar-collaborator named Terrace Martin. “It’s like a husband and a wife,” he says, using the well-worn metaphor to describe the connection between a musician and their instrument. “Some horns I may think are no good, but to someone else it’s perfect. It has a lot to do with your body chemistry.” 

Joshua Redman, a star of the newer guard of saxophone players to emerge in the last 20 years, also got his start on a Mark VI played by his father, the tenor player Dewey Redman. But Joshua now prefers the Super Balanced Action. “There’s something more vulnerable about it, a little more poignant, and greater range for inflection,” he says. “The Mark VI has a sound that’s slightly more focused and powerful, but maybe not as expansive.”

There are some professional musicians who will extol the virtues of more modern horns. In recent decades, two Japanese companies, Yanagisawa and Yamaha, started to gain a market share. Sax aficionados say those companies’ horns, the design of which, like most other saxophones, was influenced by the Mark VI, play well. While Selmer’s Mark VII line, which followed the VI, is by most accounts an inferior horn, as the company’s production style changed. Though they still have two engravers at their factory, engravings on some of their models—once beautifully intricate scrawls done by hand—are now made with a machine.

At this point, Selmer competes for sales with the horn that it hasn’t made for more than 30 years, walking a fine line between honoring their most famous model and pitching their newer products. The company’s current horns, all descendants of the Balanced Action and Mark VI designs, are very well-regarded, but they don’t always inspire the level of excitement that Mark VIs do. “The Mark VI became a legend, a myth,” Florent Milhaud, the saxophone product manager at the company, tells me. “It was the perfect instrument at the perfect time.” 

Milhaud says he thinks younger players gravitate to Mark VIs because of the nature of jazz, which is rooted so deeply in its history. The horn is imbued with a significant mythology; a theory that Mark VIs were made from recasted artillery shells and church bells in France in the aftermath of the war continues to circulate widely, despite the company’s assertions that it’s not true. “Sometimes the musicians don’t want to know the truth,” Milhaud says. “They just want to believe in the nicest history.” 

Milhaud points to Benny Golson and Wayne Shorter, musicians who actually played Selmers during jazz’s golden age, but who opened up to newer horns later in their lives. “They don’t need to look for something in this instrument from this period,” he says. “They have a more objective relationship with the instrument.” He claims that blind tests, where a player switches between a modern and vintage horn and other people decide which sounds better, often fail to confirm the superiority of the older horns.

Photo by David Brandon Geeting

Jazz has continued evolving, with horn players like Washington giving big hopes for the movement’s reinvention and relevance. But like the Mark VI, the genre has never quite lived down its peak era. This affinity for classic jazz has fueled a strong demand for Mark VIs, even as their prices steadily climb. Saxophone message boards and classified sites online are populated by fanatics buying and selling the horns, or inquiring where to find them. There are seemingly endless debates about which serial numbers—which correspond to the years which the horns were made—or which production facility the horn was assembled in makes for a more perfect horn.  

People who specialize in finding and selling the vintage horns say the Internet upended their business model. Before the growth of forums and websites like eBay and Craigslist, an enterprising buyer could rifle through garage sales or old music shops to find vintage horns at low prices. Saxquest’s Mark Overton describes taking out classified ads in local papers—“Wanted: old used saxophones, will pay cash”—and hauling back a bounty of horns. “I’d get the car full of saxophones and drive back in a blizzard,” he says. “It was a lot more fun than today, where a little of that personal transaction is lost.”

The market is more transparent, with fewer forgotten Selmers found in dusty attics. “Everybody knows vintage saxophones are worth money now,” Overton says. “We work on a lower margin but still do a ton of volume.” His store sells $150,000 worth of saxophones a month. 

It’s not just the buying ways of instrument dealers that have been overturned. Musicians used to trawl old pawn shops on the hunt for Mark VIs too. But now, many less established ones are lucky to be able to afford one at all. Whereas a Mark VI could be purchased for a couple thousand dollars in the ’90s, demand has generally jacked up the price. 

Roberto’s Woodwinds, on West 46th Street in Manhattan, has a dedicated Mark VI room, a temperature-controlled space the size of a large hot tub filled with rows of brilliant old saxophones: a deep bronze tenor from 1954, selling for $12,000; a gold-plated alto, also $12,000, gleaming like the riches of Ali Baba’s cave; a brightly polished tenor plated in silver—an edition originally made to help with corrosion in Caribbean countries—shining like a vintage coin; a worn-looking sax, with a deep patina spreading like moss over the its bell; all of them beautiful objects, material links to a distant world.

Store owner Roberto Romeo talks about the days before the Internet in similar terms as Overton, admitting that he helped raise the market price for vintage Selmers. Now, he rarely sells a Mark VI tenor for less than $8,000 (the altos can be less expensive). He says he once sold one that had never been played for $40,000. “People got really mad with me,” he recalls.

Whereas he began his career as a repairman who worked mostly with musicians and students, a large part of his business now comes from selling horns to deep-pocketed buyers—high-powered collectors, doctors, lawyers, bankers—some of whom can’t even play them. “They want to buy something that looks nice,” he says. One buyer would come into his store once a month and ask what the best horn in the house was—and then write a check on spot. “This guy spent almost $100,000 on Mark VIs,” Romeo says. “He loved the horn—he couldn’t really play it.”

A sizable amount of these buyers are foreign, hailing from places like Russia, South Korea, London, and Hong Kong. Romeo is often approached through third-party buyers. “We never know who the other guy is,” Romeo says. “They don’t want us to know.” He acknowledges that the high-end sales probably have a ripple effect, raising the prices down the ladder, even for the more worn-in horns that are unlikely to catch the eye of a buyer looking for a shiny display. “Very few musicians buy the instrument, unfortunately,” he concedes. 

As Romeo talks in the cluttered office above his small store, the sounds of sax players running scales floats up the stairs from the practice space beneath us. Worn instrument boxes line the shelves on both sides of the room. The red and white light of the TGI Friday’s outside glows through the windows. Roberto’s Woodwinds is just a couple of blocks from where Sonny Rollins purchased his horn more than 35 years ago.

I think about what secrets the Mark VI promises that makes it such an object of fascination and desire. Rollins is so connected to his saxophone that he always keeps it in the same room he’s in. “My late wife wasn’t jealous,” he says. Maybe she didn’t have any reason to be. “I can’t say it’s the horn, it’s up to me,” Rollins says. “But the horn has helped me play my best. It’s never betrayed me.”

Via