Sax Appeal

In the 19th century, Western Europe experienced a gold rush in musical innovation. It was a time of unprecedented opportunity, when your improvement to an ancient instrument—like the trumpet or flute—could make you a small fortune. It was also a time when it was actually possible to invent a new musical instrument, almost from scratch, and have it taken up by bands across the world.

One of the biggest successes from this era was the saxophone: a brand new hybrid brass and woodwind instrument that not only secured a spot in the musical canon but changed American music forever.

Adolphe Sax and his ‘Saxtruments’

The man behind the saxophone was a brash inventor named Adolphe Sax. Adolphe Sax was born in Dinant, Belgium in 1814. He had a tragicomic childhood that nearly killed him before he was able to invent anything. As a child he fell down three flights of stairs, drank sulfuric acid mistaking it for milk, survived multiple burns, and once fell asleep in a room full of freshly varnished furniture. His mother said, “He’s a child condemned to misfortune; he won’t live.”

Against all odds, Adolphe survived and joined his father’s instrument-making business. Though he was a virtuoso on flute and clarinet with a promising performance career ahead, he ultimately thought he had a better chance of striking it rich with the right invention.

Working in the family workshop, Adolphe Sax experimented with the bass clarinet, using acoustics to precisely place tone holes rather than eyeballing it. When he showcased his redesigned bass clarinet in 1835, aficionados loved it. The design he created, a wooden tube curving into a metal bell, looks a lot like the saxophone eventually would.

As a young man, Adolphe moved to Paris, the center of brass instrument manufacturing, to seek his fortune. In 1843, he set up shop and created new families of horns: saxhorns and saxotrombas. He didn’t exactly invent these from scratch—more like improved existing designs and added “sax” to the name.

Battle of the Bands!

But if he wanted to make real money, Adolphe needed a bigger client, and he set his sights on landing a lucrative military contract. At the time, France’s military bands were lagging behind other European powers. Austria and Prussia had loud, impressive brass instruments. France’s band, on the other hand, was dominated by woodwinds, which sounded elegant but didn’t have the force to fill a parade ground.

In 1845, the French Ministry of War established a commission to investigate improvements to its military bands, and Adolphe saw his opportunity. His starting point was the ophicleide, a loud but clunky instrument that was difficult to play in tune. Composer Hector Berlioz said its quality was “rude… It is as if a bull, escaped from its stall, had come to play off its vagaries in the middle of a drawing-room.”

Adolphe adapted the ophicleide, replacing its brass mouthpiece with a clarinet reed mouthpiece for a smoother, richer sound. He also placed the boreholes scientifically, just as he had with the bass clarinet. Sax designed not just one instrument but a whole family of instruments at different pitches—a chorus working together like human voices and named them after himself: the saxophones.

Adolphe patented his saxophones in 1846. The lineup included the instrument instantly recognizable as a saxophone today—one with a bell-shaped horn, reed mouthpiece, and that iconic S-shape. It was light, sturdy, easy to hold while marching, loud enough to carry outdoors, yet with the refined tone of a clarinet. In other words, the perfect military instrument.

But military bands are conservative places. You can imagine how they’d react to a brash young Belgian slapping his name on a trumpet and calling it a Saxhorn. Ultimately, a military commission decided to let the public settle the matter in the only way that a musical debate can be settled

On April 22, 1845, two bands faced off at the Champ de Mars. On one side, a traditional woodwind-heavy band. On the other, Sax’s band full of saxhorns and saxophones. After four hours, the audience cheered louder for Sax’s ensemble. He won that military contract, and business boomed.

But Adolphe’s hubris and enemies caught up with him. He got tied up in expensive lawsuits over the patents for his instruments. The patents held up, but when France lost the Franco-Prussian War, the military downsized the military bands. Sax took on loans he couldn’t afford and went bankrupt three times. He lost his factory, but perhaps more heartbreaking to him…he lost his music.

His collection of over four hundred instruments was sold off and Adolphe died in poverty in Paris in 1894.

An American Instrument

Even as European sales fell, the saxophone was gaining traction in America—not in military bands but as a cheap, fun instrument marketed to everyday people. In the early 20th century, the US experienced a “saxophone craze.” Manufacturers churned out novelty instruments for circuses, vaudeville, and living rooms. It was marketed as a social tool: play the saxophone and be more popular.

But the saxophone didn’t disappear. All those instruments from the sax craze were still floating around and they got picked up and used to pioneer what would become America’s defining musical genre: jazz. In the 1930s, big bands were using the saxophone to keep dancers on the floor. Then the sax became a jazz soloist’s instrument. Charlie Parker and others invented bebop—intellectual music with fast notes and virtuosos. Jazz players showcased the instrument’s flexibility, using both brash tones and smooth, nuanced sounds that mimicked the human voice.

Over the course of a century the instrument had become an iconic American instrument. And now with jazz, it was a Black Americans’ instrument.

This brought pushback. Some white musicians felt jazz debased the “proper” instrument. A 1917 column declared: “God save us from the hideous cat-calling that is so much in vogue at present termed ‘Jassing’… Really, the ‘Jasser’ should be subject to the same quarantine restrictions as if he had the foot and mouth disease.”

To many, jazz and the saxophone represented the forbidden—smoky clubs, Prohibition speakeasies, and activities funded by organized crime. This reputation followed the saxophone back to Europe with devastating consequences. The Nazis banned it as “degenerate music,” featuring it in propaganda posters. The Soviets sent saxophonists to gulags. The Vatican excluded it from churches worldwide.

By this point the instrument had shape-shifted over and over again. It went from European military innovation to novelty item to powerful symbol of Black American music to enemy number one of fascist regimes, several countries and the Catholic Church.

But like many taboos, the sax eventually went mainstream. The saxophone rippled into pop music, then hip-hop. The ’80s were peak saxophone—think oiled-up shirtless guys and “Careless Whisper.” Eventually, though, the sax settled into a comfortable omnipresence. It became just another instrument, something you might add to a standard rock or pop lineup, or pick up in music class.

Yet, this image doesn’t do justice to the saxophone. The sax’s brilliance has always been its versatility. Adolphe Sax designed it as a marriage of loud and soft, bold and smooth—loud enough to hold its own on any stage, yet nuanced enough to rise and fall like the human voice. Saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin puts it perfectly: “For me it’s just the most versatile way to be all your complete self.”

The sound might fundamentally be air vibrating inside a metal tube. But how it makes you feel? That’s all about the human blowing on that reed, pressing those keys, and feeling the sax appeal.