ABSTRACT
This chapter tells the story of a particular saxophone, an alto model made by the Grafton company in the early 1950s and given the serial number 10265. This specific instrument is particularly associated with Charlie Parker, notwithstanding that he played it only occasionally and seldom in the United States. But the association is significant enough that Grafton 10265 was acquired in 1994 by the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Parker's birthplace, as one of the exhibits celebrating those aspects of the jazz tradition which are closely identified with the city.
In telling the story of Grafton 10265, I consider how focusing on the object biography of musical instruments illustrates not only how they become imbued with qualities that are both constitutive and reflective of their time and place, but also how they can be seen as having ‘thing power’, as Jane Bennett (2010, 6) puts it, ‘the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle’. I draw attention to some of the conceptual overlaps between ethnographic writing and literary fiction in representing the lives of these musical ‘things’ and, in the case of Grafton 10265, I show how focusing on the biographical details of this particular musical object provides insights into the broader cultural patterns within which that biography is played out.
