Hi Eve.
Welcome to SOTW
To give you accurate info on your sax, you would need to put up a little set of photos of it.

 

On older yanagisawas the third and four digits is the year.... which would put this one in 1967. I assume this is not a 500 series yana but a A-5 or T-5 stencil (depending if it is an alto or tenor)- yanagisawa made many stencils in their early days.
Here is a good site if you want to read about yanagisawas history:
http://saxpics.com/?v=man&manID=21

As far as value it is hard to say... older yanagisawas are often cheap and undervalued - maybe $500-$750 depending on condition and alto/tenor.

 

The date code in the serial, at least the known one, came about in the late '60s, and was month followed by year (so 270xxx is February 1970, 1072xxx is October 1972, etc.) I believe the ones with another number stamped above the serial are earlier than that but I haven't seen enough examples to even guess what the serials mean, if anything.

Pictures would help greatly.

 

The date code in the serial was month followed by year.

NO? Saxpics: "Before 1980 the 3rd and 4th digit of the serial number represents the year of manufacture." Which is the same information I have seen on other sites as well...

Yvonne - I bet your sax is a A-5 alto. A stencil horn made by Yanagisawa to another company who sold them under the name Continental. I've seen other A-5 stencils under the name Prima 500 for example.

Your sax might be a good player but nothing of value - but you can try to sell it here on SOTW or on ebay or to a local musicstore to make sure it gets a happy new owner!

 

Many thanks to all the replies. The Saxophone needs a clean up, then I will take pictures and post.
I don't know whether it's an Alto or Tenor is there a way to find out?

 

Is the neck relatively straight (alto), or is it curvy tenor)?
Just google image tenor and alto, you'l be able to figure it out pretty easily

 

Yeh after I searched online to see what the difference was, I found out it was an Alto

 

It's not published anywhere, some time ago I examined a lot of older Yanagisawas on eBay and arrived at that conclusion based on the instruments I found.

 

Interesting! Did you save any research for public?