19th century superbone?
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2025 7:22 pm
From the Historic Brass Society article "Adolphe Sax: Visionary or Plagiarist?":
Who knew!https://www.historicbrass.org/images/hbj/hbj-2008/HBSJ_2008_JL01_005_MM.pdf wrote:Additionally, the execution of legato was not always easy. The valve trombone could definitely not be a substitute for it. Sax claimed to combine the advantages of both instruments in his own version, in which an ordinary tenor trombone is equipped with a larger bell and a valve is placed close to the joint between the bell and slide sections; this extends the instrument’s range in the lower register. The slide section is also equipped with another two or three valves that could be used to facilitate the execution of certain musical passages, especially in the higher register of the instrument. These “new” features could be used either separately or in combination.
...
The slide trombone with three valves was later offered by Besson. The concept of a duplex trombone was reinvented ca. 1970 as the “Superbone” by Ashley Alexander and/or Maynard Ferguson with the Holton Company in the U.S.A.
here's a