Horn Players Get Down to Brass Tacks of Business

Visions of Lee Iacocca romp through your mind as you talk to tubaist Charles Daellenbach and trombonist Gene Watts.

Can it be that they share a vision?

The two musicians want to revive a once-dominant American industry.

Restore enterprise.

Renew a work ethic.

Compete in world markets.

Build better.

And while at it, blow their own horns.

Daellenbach and Watts, two-fifths of the freewheeling musical group the Canadian Brass are not, however, corporate commandants with heavyweight compensation packages looking for help, headlines and executive privilege.

They do recognize, however, that while an oboe may be the ill wind no one blows well, it does take brass to sell a horn.

The two senior members of the 20-year-old touring and performing brass ensemble are concerned about the status of music in this country and have set out to do something about it, reaching like a stretching trombonist deeply inward to the past and then off into the highs of a distant future.

Build a better bugle, sax and horn and the world will beat a rhythmic path to their doors. They believe.

Beside staging 100-plus concerts a touring year, the Canadian Brass has spun off several new businesses and projects. One division makes a line of contemporary brass instruments, the only American company that is producing exclusively the full range of brasses. Another produces instructional material for schools still scrambling to maintain music training programs. Another is testing the next generation of home entertainment.

Like many people in the pursuit of show-business excellence, Canadian Brass is chasing after what economists call extra value, getting greater cash flow without changing the plumbing. In the motion-picture business, extra value is produced when a movie makes money beyond the box office as it travels from theaters to cable television to home videos to laser discs to network television to foreign markets. In television, extra value comes from endless reruns and restored outtakes. In the recording business, it comes from concert videos, enhanced and redubbed discs, specially packaged collections.

You just don’t expect the same from brass players, however.

But under the name of Canadian Brass Enterprises, Inc., Daellenbach and Watts are making and marketing their own instruments, hoping in part to revive an industry that once was a great American enterprise but now is owned largely by foreign companies. Their hand-constructed trumpets and trombones come off workbenches in Wisconsin while their tubas are being made to their specifications in Switzerland, their French horns in Germany.

They have a singular vision: to make instruments that fit what Daellenbach and Watts (both Americans) call the American ear. The Canadian Brass is an eclectic group, starting their concerts at the back of the hall, moving to the stage to the sounds of a New Orleans funeral band. Once on the platform the group moves from Dixieland to Bach fugues to commissioned works by Lukas Foss to Sousa marches.

Obviously, Daellenbach and Watts reasoned, if they were to make instruments they would have to meet the same demands that they placed on themselves in their concerts--instruments acceptable to all of the variables of American music, the demands of symphonic players, small group performers and soloists.

Small things make a difference in instruments, Daellenbach says, for to non-musicians all brass looks the same. But even the flair of a trumpet’s bell can make a difference; so, too, the amount of brass in the instrument’s metal composition and the thickness of its many parts, the sizing and deployment of its tubing.

What Canadian Brass is doing is on the scale of some latter-day Antonio Stradivari daring to hand-build all of the instruments of a string quartet.

Today’s musicians have to be more versatile than specialists of the past, Daellenbach and Watts believe, capable of playing at recording sessions, concerts, even at weddings and in lounges. Orchestra players of the past rarely dabbled in jazz or outside their territories and jazz players rarely crossed over to the classics. The popularity, though, of a Wynton Marsalis in several musical forms has spread the word about the values of diversity in performance.

Last year Daellenbach and Watts as co-presidents personally financed their instrument-making venture. They set up an office in Milwaukee, hired a general manager and a bookkeeper, laid out their specifications for their American instruments to three manufacturers and then lined up retail stores. Their numbers--when compared to the biggest instrument maker, Yamaha, which controls an estimated one-third of the world’s horn business--are at this point clearly small-scale. On a $150,000 start-up budget, the company realized $200,000 in first-year sales. Daellenbach’s and Watts’ second-year projection for U.S. and foreign sales for their $1,400 to $7,500 instruments is $1 million.

They have one selling technique other instrument makers lack--one that may propel their sales to higher levels. They let it be known long before they hit a town that if concertgoers want to try out the new line of brasses after the program they can if they bring their own mouthpieces, a sort of musical version of kicking tires, a lip-on experience.

Despite recessionary programs, instrument manufacturing remains a competitive business. The American Music Conference estimates that 61 million Americans play some form of instrument. While the piano and guitar are 1-2 in sales, the flute, trumpet and saxophone are among the 10 major sellers in this country.

The music business does have its cycles. In 1980 some 197,000 units were shipped. That dipped to 144,600 in 1985 but rose again to 146,000 in 1990.

How much an impact the Canadian Brass will make will be left to the lips of the mouthpiece-toting members of their audiences. Meanwhile the group continues to look for extra value, producing a line of method books for school music programs, ranging from beginners to chamber music groups. They’ve also produced several videos covering similar audiences.

This week the Canadian Brass’ first high-definition laser disc, “Home Movies,” a replication of concert performances, goes on sale in Japan via the Philips Classics label. Sometime this year its first five-carrier package will be released--an audio CD, a tape, a laser disc, a VHS video and in Europe, an LP.

The group maintains an adopt-a-school project, conducting musical workshops that help raise funds for school music programs in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York and San Francisco.

The pursuit of extra value essentially means one thing to this gaggle of brass players, and that’s to keep the music going, whether on stage, in classrooms, on recordings, or on Wisconsin workbenches, so very west of Detroit.