Charles Jean-Baptiste Soualle and the Saxophone

Charles Jean-Baptiste Soualle is an enigmatic figure in the history of nineteenth-century music. It is sometimes recognized that he achieved distinction as a clarinettist and saxophonist in Paris and London in the late 1840s and early 1850s, before undertaking a world tour that was prodigious by the standards of the time; and that he adopted the orientalist stage persona of ‘Ali Ben Sou Alle’, performing on a modified version of the saxophone which, in keeping with his stage act, he renamed as a ‘turkophone’. But details beyond these bare facts are often elusive. This paper explores Soualle’s global concertizing in the mid-nineteenth century and endeavors to set out an authoritative version of a story that makes tantalizing appearances elsewhere.1 It considers Soualle’s contribution not only to the saxophone’s dissemination and repertory in the nineteenth-century, but also, because of several modifications to the instrument that he protected by patent in 1860, to its technical development. In short, the paper seeks to position Soualle as a rather more important figure in saxophone history than has previously been accepted