Castle Rock — Al Sears Tenor Saxophone Transcription

Music by Al Sears · Recorded 1951 · 4 pages · Tenor sax solo only

Score & Recording on YouTube

Al Sears — Biography

The Tenor Player Who Kept Replacing Legends

Albert Omega Sears was born in Macomb, Illinois on 21 February 1910. His first major job came in 1928, when he was eighteen: he was hired into Chick Webb's band at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, replacing a young alto player named Johnny Hodges. It is a detail worth holding on to, because twenty-three years later the two men would make a hit record together.

Through the 1930s Sears worked with Elmer Snowden and then led his own groups for most of the period between 1933 and 1941. The early 1940s took him through Andy Kirk's band and then Lionel Hampton's, before the job that made his name: in 1944 he joined the Duke Ellington Orchestra, taking over the tenor chair from Ben Webster. He held it for five years, and when he left in 1949 the seat passed first to Jimmy Forrest and then to Paul Gonsalves.

Following Ben Webster and preceding Paul Gonsalves is a difficult place to stand in jazz history, and Sears has been somewhat overshadowed by both. But his own voice was distinct and immediately recognisable: a big, broad tone with real physical weight to it, a rhythmic attack that leaned harder into the beat than most swing players of his generation, and an instinct for building a solo through sheer accumulating intensity rather than through harmonic complexity. That combination made him one of Ellington's most colourful soloists, and it made him unusually well suited to what came next.

What came next was rhythm and blues. Sears joined Johnny Hodges' new small group in 1951, wrote and recorded Castle Rock, and then spent the rest of the decade at the point where jazz was turning into rock and roll. He worked in Alan Freed's band for Freed's live rock and roll revues, billed as “Big Al Sears,” and played on countless R&B sessions — including, in 1961, Aretha Franklin's first Columbia album. He recorded as a leader for Prestige and Swingville around 1960, and he owned several record labels of his own: Arock, Serock and Gator. He died in St. Albans, New York on 23 March 1990, aged 80.

Castle Rock — The 1951 Record

Mercury Records, 1951 · Written and Played by Al Sears

In 1951 Al Sears joined a new small group led by alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, alongside several other Ellington alumni including trombonist Lawrence Brown and drummer Sonny Greer. It was the setting that produced the biggest record of Sears' career.

Castle Rock was Sears' tune. He copyrighted it as an instrumental in March 1951, and the band cut it in New York on 3 March that year for Mercury, backed with Jeep's Blues. The line-up was Johnny Hodges on alto, Emmett Berry on trumpet, Lawrence Brown on trombone, Al Sears on tenor, Leroy Lovett on piano, Lloyd Trotman on bass and Sonny Greer on drums — a band Hodges had just assembled after leaving the Ellington orchestra to strike out on his own.

It took off. The record entered Billboard's rhythm and blues retail chart in July 1951 and climbed to number five, staying on the listing for nine weeks and reaching number four on the most-played chart. In September it crossed over to the pop chart, peaking at number twenty-eight. For the new band it was the hit that launched them — and, as it turned out, the only one they would have.

The strange thing about Castle Rock is that the man on the label is barely the man on the record. It is Sears' composition and Sears' tenor that drive the whole performance from start to finish, and jazz writers have long pointed out the irony: Al Sears' one genuine hit was released under someone else's name, and the credit has followed Hodges ever since. Quite how much alto is audible is a point some collectors still argue about, but nobody disputes whose record it really is.

The tune had a second life almost immediately. Lyrics were added — first by Leroy Lovett and Ted Travers, then, after the publisher George Weiner got involved, a new set by Ervin Drake and Jimmy Shirl. Frank Sinatra recorded that vocal version in July 1951 with Harry James, in an arrangement by Ray Conniff. Sinatra is said to have disliked the song intensely, which did not stop it reaching the top ten and becoming his last top-ten single of his Columbia years.

The instrumental was later gathered onto the Norgran LP Castle Rock (MGN 1048, 1955), produced by Norman Granz, which collects the 1951–52 sides by the band. It is the easiest place to hear the original today — listen on Spotify while you read the score.

About the Solo

Ten Choruses of Twelve-Bar Blues

Castle Rock is a twelve-bar blues taken at a swung 160 beats per minute. The transcription is written in B♭ for tenor saxophone, which sounds in A♭ concert. The form never varies: every rehearsal letter in the score lands exactly twelve bars after the last one, and the whole transcription runs to ten choruses.

Letter A is the head: a short, hard-hitting riff stated three times across the twelve bars, each statement dropping off the end with a fall. It is deliberately simple — two bars of material that anyone could hum after one listen, which is exactly why the record sold. From letter B onward the score follows Al Sears himself.

What makes the solo worth studying is how little Sears relies on notes to build it. There is almost no harmonic complexity here; the vocabulary is blues, plain and direct, with chromatic approach notes decorating a small handful of core shapes. The development happens somewhere else entirely — in articulation, in dynamics, and in the physical sound of the horn.

Watch what he does with volume. In places the score swings from pp to ff and back inside a few bars, which at this tempo is a genuinely aggressive effect. Around letter E a shake opens the chorus; by letters G and H the growls arrive in earnest and stay, and Sears starts leaving whole bars empty so the band's riff can answer him. The final choruses tighten into triplet figures and repeated honks before the whole thing lands.

None of this came from nowhere. Nine years earlier a nineteen-year-old Illinois Jacquet had done something very similar, and far more shocking at the time, on Flying Home — abandoning melodic line altogether in favour of one hammered, repeated note. That solo is generally taken as the first R&B saxophone solo, and Castle Rock is what the idea sounded like once it had settled into a style.

This is architecture by intensity rather than by harmony, and it is a genuinely different skill from the one bebop asks for. If you have spent your practice time learning to navigate changes, a solo like this is a useful corrective: it is a reminder that an audience responds to sound, rhythm and commitment long before it responds to note choice. Sears understood that better than almost anyone, and Castle Rock is the proof — a record built almost entirely out of attitude that outsold most of the sophisticated jazz released the same year.

How to Play It — Growl, Honk & Blues Phrasing

How to Growl on Saxophone, and the Other R&B Tenor Effects

Almost every expressive device in the R&B tenor vocabulary turns up somewhere in this solo. Here is what each marking means and how to produce it.

1. The growl. To growl on the saxophone, you hum or sing a note in your throat while you play. The sung pitch and the played pitch interfere with each other, and the result is that rough, buzzing, slightly furious texture. Start on a comfortable mid-range long tone, hum a pitch somewhere near but not identical to the note you are fingering, and keep the air moving steadily — the commonest mistake when learning to growl is letting the air collapse the moment the throat engages. Some players find it easier to start from a rolled or guttural “rrrr” sound rather than a sung pitch; both routes work, and it is worth trying each. Practise switching the growl on and off cleanly. In Castle Rock it is marked in specific places, mostly from letter G onward, and it works precisely because it is not there the whole time.

2. Falls and drops. Many phrases fall off the end of the last note rather than stopping. Let the note begin properly in tune, then relax the embouchure and let the pitch slide downward while the air tails off. A fall is a controlled release, not a fumbled ending — it should sound intentional every single time.

3. Scoops. The opposite gesture: arrive at the note from underneath. Start slightly flat with a looser embouchure and firm up into the centre of the pitch as the note sounds. Used sparingly it gives a phrase a vocal, blues-shouter quality.

4. The lip-down. One place in the score carries the direction to lip down through the note — meaning the pitch bends downward while the note is still sounding, rather than at the end of it. This is pure embouchure control. Practise it as an exercise on a single long tone: bend down as far as you can while keeping the tone alive, then bring it back up.

5. Ghost notes. Notes marked with a cross are ghosted — half-swallowed, felt more than heard. Keep the fingering but back off the air and let the tongue close down on the reed. Ghosting is what gives a blues line its internal rhythm; the notes you suppress define the ones you accent.

6. Dynamics. Do not treat these as suggestions. The score moves between pp and ff in the space of a couple of bars in places, and those contrasts are the structure of the whole solo. Mark them in your part and over-exaggerate them at first — you can always pull back later.

7. Time feel above everything. At 160 with a swing feel, Sears sits right on the beat with real weight. He is not laying back the way Lester Young does, and he is not pushing. Play the transcription with the record until your placement matches his, because the entire character of the solo depends on it.

A word of caution on growling: it should be an effect you deploy, not a permanent feature of your tone. Players who first work out how to growl on a saxophone tend to overuse it, and a growl that never stops stops meaning anything. Build a clean, centred sound first, then add this on top. If you want to hear the same principle applied on alto, Earl Bostic's solo on Earl Blows a Fuse is the other great study in controlled R&B saxophone fire, and Hurricane Blues shows the same vocabulary compressed into a single twelve-bar chorus.

If you would like feedback on any of this — growl technique in particular is much easier to fix in person than from a written description — saxophone lessons are available in South East London and online. You can also browse the rest of the free saxophone transcriptions on this site.

The Album — Castle Rock

Norgran Records MGN 1048, 1955

The single came first and the album followed four years later. Castle Rock (Norgran MGN 1048) was assembled by Norman Granz in 1955 out of the small-group sides the band cut in New York across 1951 and 1952, with the hit as the opening track. It is the easiest way to hear the original recording today, and the most useful, because it puts the tune in context alongside everything else the group was doing at the time.

Three of the twelve tracks are Al Sears compositions: Castle Rock itself, A Gentle Breeze and Something to Pat Your Foot To. That is a quarter of the record written by the tenor player, which says something about how central he was to this band despite never having his name on the sleeve. The rest is split between Ellington-associated material such as Jeep's Blues and The Jeep Is Jumpin', and originals by pianist Leroy Lovett.

The personnel shifts a little between dates, but the core is Emmett Berry on trumpet, Lawrence Brown on trombone, Al Sears on tenor, Leroy Lovett on piano, Lloyd Trotman on bass and Sonny Greer on drums. Billy Strayhorn turns up on piano for one track. Castle Rock was taped on 3 March 1951 and runs a compact 2:40 on record — worth knowing, because the transcription here covers ten full choruses, which tells you just how fast this thing moves.

Critical opinion on the album has always been mixed; AllMusic gives it three stars and reads it as a somewhat uneven attempt to break from an established sound. That is a fair assessment of the record as a whole, but it rather undersells the title track, which did something none of the rest did: it sold. If you want to place this album in the wider run of releases either side of it, the sortable Johnny Hodges discography lists every album from the band's four years together and beyond, with listening links; there is also a full profile of Hodges if you want the background on the bandleader.

For a contrasting approach to the same twelve-bar form from the same era, the Benny Carter transcription of Jive at Six shows what elegance and restraint sound like over a blues — about as far from Castle Rock's approach as you can get while playing the same changes.