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 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.

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 ...