Charlie Irvis, who was known as Charlie Plug, was our original trombone player down in the Kentucky Club. He was called Plug because of the device he used on his horn. In those days they manufactured a kind of mute designed to make the trombone sound like a saxophone. The sax was still regarded as new then. Charlie had dropped this device and broken it, so he used what was left of it, rolling it around the bell of his trombone. He couldn't use it the way it was intended, because of the part broken off, but he'd get this entirely different, lecherous, low tone, and no one has ever done it since. You might say that there was really a lost art. << less