Invented in the early 1840s, the saxophone was a relative latecomer to music—and to jazz. But starting in the mid-1920s, with the rise of the big bands, the instrument slowly but steadily evolved from ...

When tenor saxophonist John Coltrane recorded his composition "Giant Steps" in 1959, he created something that changed the way musicians thought about improvisation and harmony. Decades earlier, the ...

When jazz fans talk about the Texas Tenor saxophone sound, they're talking about a sound which is very robust, sometimes raw, and which mixes the musical vocabularies of swing, bebop, blues and R&B.

Coleman Hawkins, known as "The Hawk" or "Bean," basically invented tenor sax as we know it, all the way down to Bill Clinton playing his way to office. After making many recordings with various groups ...

1846: Emerging from his Paris workshop, musician-inventor Adolphe Sax files 14 patents for an instrument destined to revolutionize American music nearly a century later. His new invention: the ...