Sammy Remembered
by Dave Sherman

Here are a few stories that I used as part of the eulogy for my uncle. I spent a lot of time with my uncle Sam over the years. He was my uncle, my trombone teacher, my boss at the Broaster House Restaurant, and my friend. 

Sam and I shared many musical moments together. First, he taught me how to play the trombone. Then, we'd listened to hours and hours of jazz in his basement. And, while we worked together all day long at the restaurant, we listened to more jazz. Between songs he  told me stories...he had lots of them.

Sammy Sherman's trombone playing technique was unique for many reasons. He used extreme high notes, doodle-tonguing and playing against the grain. In addition to being a trombonist, he was also an accomplished jazz violinist. He said that he felt that his violin playing had an influence on his trombone phrasing.

Sammy was doodle-tonguing before this technique was given its name. The late Carl Fontana has been credited with popularizing doodle-tonguing, but Sammy was using it early in his career. Sammy never learnt to double or triple tongue so he figured out the best way to articulate fast jazz playing. If Sammy didn't invent doodle-tonguing he was one of its first practitioners.

Sammy liked to play extremely high notes, higher than most trumpet players could play. A trumpet player in fact inspired him. Back in the late 60s I used to visit Sammy on weekends. We would listen to albums that I found in the bargain bin at Warwick Shoppers World department store. Jazz greats such as Slide Hampton, Albert Mangelsdorff, Harry Lookosfsky, Herbie Mann, Jimmy Giuffre, Mingus and the high note king himself, Maynard Ferguson were among the finds in the bargain bin. Sammy would occasionally pick up his horn and play along with the record imitating what the horn player was doing. He, of course, couldn't play the notes that Maynard could. This frustrated him to the point of coming up with a new method of playing. After many frustrating attempts to hit Maynard's high notes Sammy told me that he had modified his mouthpiece and that he could now hit notes higher than he ever played before.

 Week after week he would keep telling me that he could play higher and higher. Once he told me that he had ruined the mouthpiece and that it couldn't be played anymore. Sammy did not get discouraged. He would start all over again with his modifications. He enlarged the cup of his mouthpiece using a power hand drill with a screwdriver attached to it and sandpaper wrapped around the handle of the screwdriver. I'm not sure how many mouthpieces he tried this on but they were scattered all around his house.

Several years ago he shared with me his theory of playing high notes. Normally a smaller mouthpiece is used to hit high notes. Sam figured that if he made the mouthpiece large enough he could then fill the mouthpiece with his lips, resulting in a small volume of space, thereby simulating a smaller mouthpiece. In addition, he would aim the air stream to the side-wall of the mouthpiece thereby increasing the air velocity. This technique apparently worked because he could hit notes higher than anyone other trombonist. Sammy attributed his glaucoma to the excessive pressure on the eyes due to his repeated high note playing. He carried around a newspaper article about the high rate of glaucoma among trumpet players, oboe players and French horn players.

High notes were not Sammy's only claim to fame. Sammy liked speed. He used a combination of doodle-tonguing and playing against the grain. He would play Tico-Tico at an extremely fast tempo. Another aspect of his playing technique involved purposely using wrong notes to allow a faster tempo. He said that if you play the group of notes fast enough then no one would notice the one bad note.

Sammy's obsession with playing fast reminds me of a funny story. One day Sammy complained that he had been trying all day to play as fast as the trombone player on an album that he was listening to. I went to the turntable to see what was playing. It was an album by Bob Brookmeyer, a valve trombonist. That’s when I noticed that the turntable speed was set at 45 rpm instead of 33-1/3. When I told Sam that the speed was set wrong we laughed, as Sammy said, "No wonder I was having trouble".

Sammy’s philosophy that "rules are made to be broken and sometimes it is better not to know what the rules are" influenced me more than he will ever know.