Culture: Every shade of sax in the city; Birmingham's uniquely comprehensive saxophone choir is heading for the showcase of Edinburgh. Terry Grimley reports.

Byline: Terry Grimley

The Birmingham-based National Saxophone Choir of Great Britain will be taking up residence on the Edinburgh Fringe this week to present its twice-daily spectacular, Sax in the City.

The 40-strong, two-thirds female ensemble, which draws its members from all over the country, was founded three years ago by Nigel Wood, who has the distinction of being the first musician to graduate from Birmingham Conservatoire with saxophone as his main instrument.

Between them, the choir's members play no fewer than eight different sizes of instrument. The standard soprano, alto, tenor and baritone are supplemented not only by the rare sopranino and bass saxes, but by the virtually unheard-of soprillo and tubax, or contrabass sax.

These instruments are handcrafted by German instrument-maker Benedict Eppelsheim, who has also lent a bass saxophone to the choir. The tubax is a re-thought, compact contrabass instrument which uses a baritone mouthpiece but is pitched an octave lower.

The minute soprillo, a piccolo sax scarcely bigger than a descant recorder, is Eppelsheim's own invention, at the cutting edge of sax technology - the octave key is actually located inside the mouthpiece as there is no room on the body of the instrument.

'There are only 20 of them in the world, and apparently I'm the only owner of one in the UK,' says Nigel Wood. 'With running the choir and my publishing company Saxtet Publications I've had less and less time for playing myself, so this tiny little squeaky thing has really got me playing again. I'm producing a website called soprillo.com and I'm hoping to record a CD with the soprillo by next year.'

The soprano used to have such a reputation for poor intonation that it became virtually extinct between the 1920s and 1960s, eventually returning dramatically to favour with a generation of superior instruments and technically better-equipped players.

The soprillo offers a different order of difficulty again: 'What's happening now is I'm doing all that work I did on the soprano again,' says Wood. 'It needs different fingering and a different embrouchure - it's not like just picking up a saxophone and all the notes are higher. While it's not impossible, it's taken me nearly a year to get the four notes above G. Even if you move something by a millimetre it makes a crucial difference. But I think with perseverence it will come.'

In the choir the soprillo has a role like a piccolo in a symphony orchestra, picking up the highlights. As resident arranger, Wood has plenty of opportunities to show off the instrument's unusual colour.

Although it is not the world's only saxophone choir, Wood believes that this is the only one to feature a range of eight instruments. In recent times the popularity of the saxophone has soared, and he doubts that it has peaked yet.

'It gives these players a home and a base, because there really is nothing else,' he says. 'I got a nice email from a saxophone teacher at the Guildhall saying he appreciated what I was doing in Birmingham because his students were really enthusiastic about the choir.

'We rehearse once a month at the DanceXchange and people travel from all over the country, even from as far as Glasgow. They travel for three hours, rehearse for five hours and travel three hours back. Birmingham is the ideal place, and I can't see it working as well anywhere else - it would be a regional saxophone choir, not a national one.'

Unfortunately the group does not tick the right boxes for public funding, so it has been built up on a rigorous self-help basis. It recently recorded a debut CD at the DanceXchange, is hoping to visit the International Saxophone Congress in Slovakia next year and has ambitious plans to build up a commissioned repertoire: young Birmingham University graduate Ben Palmer has already contributed a well-received piece called Chimes.

Next January the choir will join forces with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group to perform a piece by Salvatore Sciarrino for 150 saxophones. It was hearing a performance of this at Edinburgh last year that gave Nigel Wood the idea of taking the choir there.

'The idea is to raise the choir's profile. It's been much too much work to organise and I'm not sure what the outcome will be, but I'm sure it's the right thing to do. This has really got people motivated.

'I think the choir has made a lot of progress in a short space of time. Each time we perform it takes it up to another level. The real difficulty so far has been getting it up and running and asking the question, what is a sax choir?'

Underpinning the choir's evolving orchestral sound on the tubax is grandmother and retired lawyer Julia Cadman, who came to join in unusual circumstances.

Nigel Wood explains: 'We were borrowing an instrument from a music shop in Somerset, and we heard that this lady had just gone in and bought one - as you do, for [pounds]12,000. I got in touch with the shop and asked who this person was, got her adress and asked if she would like to join the choir. Julia drags this coffin-like case all the way from Manchester to Birmingham on the train.' Since the instrument is too heavy to pick up and has to be played on a stand, participation in yesterday's Fringe Cavalcade - a two-mile parade around Edinburgh's streets - was provoking some ingenious possible transport solutions right up to the last minute.

The essential contribution this bassiest of saxophones makes to the choir is often not that easy to pick out, though you would be likely to miss it if it was taken away. But at the end of Nigel Wood's composition Under the Veil it is given its own few seconds of glory.

'There's this very, very long quiet note right at the end. It's just gorgeous, and you think 'That's a [pounds] 12,000 note there.' n The National Saxophone Choir of Great Britain performs at the Reid Hall, Edinburgh, from Tuesday to Saturday at 12 noon and 7pm daily (Reid Hall box office: 0131 662 8740 www.uoefo.com). For further information on the choir, visit www.saxchoir.com

CAPTION(S):

Nigel Wood and Julia Cadman with the soprillo and tubax saxophones