Sax Appeal

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. 

I want you to imagine a world where you can just invent a musical instrument. I don’t mean when you were a kid and you put some rubber bands on a tissue box. I mean you come up with a new instrument almost from scratch and then watch as that instrument gets taken up and played in nearly every marching band, jazz band, and high school music classroom across the country. 

JAY COCKBURN: There actually was a time where this kind of thing happened. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s reporter Jay Cockburn. 

JAY COCKBURN: In the 19th century, Western Europe saw an explosion of instrument innovation, where the entire landscape of instrumentation was shifting, and where there was money to be made if your improvements caught on with the public. 

ROMAN MARS: This is when many of the instruments we know today reached their modern forms. Trumpets had been around since Roman times, but in the 19th century they took on the valved form we know today. And flutes went from being conical, wooden instruments to metal cylinders. 

JAY COCKBURN: But one of the greatest innovations to come out of this time was the saxophone. The saxophone wasn’t an improvement on a previous instrument. It was a brand new invention–a hybrid of brass and woodwind that not only managed to secure a spot in the musical canon, but also went on to change American music forever. 

ROMAN MARS: Its design came from the mind of a brash young entrepreneur. 

JAY COCKBURN: His name, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Sax. 

ROMAN MARS: Adolphe Sax was born in Dinant, Belgium, in 1814. 

JAY COCKBURN: His full name was actually Antoine-Joseph Sax. But at the time, Adolphe wasn’t–you know–taken. So, he went by that instead.

STEPHEN COTTRELL: It’s difficult not to remember him as this romanticized figure–the rags to riches to rags, the fiery temper…

ROMAN MARS: This is Dr. Stephen Cottrell, Emeritus Professor of Music at City St George’s, University of London. 

STEPHEN COTTRELL: The brilliant innovator, yet saddled with personal demons and professional challenges throughout his life… 

ROMAN MARS: He’s the author of a book called The Saxophone. But that book might never have been written because Sax nearly died before he invented anything, like many, many times. 

JAY COCKBURN: Adolphe Sax was the eldest of eleven children, only four of whom made it to age 30, so the odds were stacked against young Adolphe from the start. And I’m gonna need a deep breath before I list the ways he apparently nearly died as a kid. 

He fell three flights of stairs and cracked his head on a stone floor. He drank a mixture of vitriol–probably what we would call sulfuric acid today–and water, mistaking it for milk. He was burned in a gunpowder explosion, and then again when a frying pan was knocked over. A stone fell off a roof and left a lifelong scar on his head. And he once fell asleep in a room full of freshly varnished furniture, but was luckily found before he succumbed to the fumes. 

STEPHEN COTTRELL: I think what we’re getting here is a picture of somebody who is energetic, getting into scrapes, whether it’s falling downstairs, whether it’s going to sleep in a room where varnish is drying, whether it’s having his head cracked open… 

ROMAN MARS: Some of these stories might be apocryphal. But this long list of mishaps is probably why his mother once said that “he’s a child condemned to misfortune. He won’t live.” Thanks, Mom. 

JAY COCKBURN: She was right about the first part, but not about the second because, against all odds, Adolphe did survive his tragicomic childhood. And as a young adult, he joined his father in the family business, making musical instruments. 

ROMAN MARS: Adolphe’s father, Charles-Joseph Sax, had gotten into instrument-making because he was a musician himself. His professional training had been as a carpenter. But when he joined a woodwind band in Dinant, he didn’t have an instrument. So, he taught himself to make one. 

JAY COCKBURN: That must have gone pretty well because soon he moved to Brussels and set up an instrument shop. That’s where young Adolphe Sax learned his craft.

STEPHEN COTTRELL: I think we have to remember we’re now talking early 19th century. Musical instrument-making in Europe, at this time, was not done in big factories. There was no industrialization involved. It was small, artisanal, individual craftsmen. It’s a much more craft-oriented tradition. 

JAY COCKBURN: Young Adolphe clearly felt the pull of opportunity. As a teen, he was enrolled in the Royal School of Music in Brussels. He was an impressive musician, a virtuoso on the flute and clarinet. When he was about 20, one composer even dedicated a clarinet piece to Adolphe Sax. 

ROMAN MARS: There was a promising career as a musician waiting for him. But he was lured back to the family instrument workshop. 

While working alongside his dad, Adolphe started experimenting with the instrument he knew best, the clarinet. 

JAY COCKBURN: Specifically the bass clarinet. The bass clarinet was kind of a quirky novelty at the time. It was difficult to play and sounded kind of nasal, and it was so long that it was difficult to get your fingers in the right place. It looked a bit like a folded bassoon. 

ROMAN MARS: So Adolphe Sax experimented with new keywork, the metal parts that you press to close the holes. He also used the science of acoustics to make the placement of those holes more precise. 

STEPHEN COTTRELL: People would put these boreholes in more or less wherever they felt it looked about right. He came up with the measurements. He decided to make this a much more scientific operation than previously in determining where the holes actually needed to be cut. 

JAY COCKBURN: This improvement meant that each instrument sounded more in tune and, when played together, the bass clarinet sounded more harmonious. And so, in 1835–in his early 20s–Adolphe Sax took his bass clarinet to an instrument show. 

ROMAN MARS: And 19th century Belgian instrument aficionados loved it.

JAY COCKBURN: In fact, the base clarinets used in orchestras today still owe their design to Adolphe Sax–a wooden tube covered in keys that curves into a metal bell shape at the bottom end. The top end crooks into a mouthpiece with a wooden reed to blow on. 

ROMAN MARS: In other words, the bass clarinet looks a lot like the saxophone eventually would. 

JAY COCKBURN: With his redesign of the bass clarinet, the name Sax was beginning to be known in musical circles. But if he really wanted to make the big francs, he had to move to Paris. 

STEPHEN COTTRELL: Brussels was very small at the time and Paris was one of the major musical centers in Europe. And Paris was particularly the center of brass wind manufacture. You had to be seen to be producing your new brass and wind instruments if you were going to be successful. 

JAY COCKBURN: In 1843, Adolphe Sax set up a workshop there and got to experimenting. He came up with new families of horns, the saxhorns, which were valved, brass instruments that looked a bit like upright trumpets, and the saxotrombas, which were valved, brass instruments that looked a bit like upright trumpets. 

ROMAN MARS: There are videos of people playing these on the internet. This is the saxhorn. 

[SAXHORN]

ROMAN MARS: And this is the saxotromba. 

[SAXOTROMBA]

JAY COCKBURN: And perhaps it’s worth noting here that Adolphe Sax didn’t really invent these instruments, so much as improve on things that already existed. 

ROMAN MARS: And then added “sax” to the name. 

JAY COCKBURN: If you asked Adolphe though, he’d probably tell you this was a “mere technicality.” “Don’t be such a saxdowner!” He’d say he was here to disrupt the industry–move fast and break things, sax-style. 

ROMAN MARS: Although Adolphe was churning out a variety of instruments, none of them had been a big enough hit to make him properly rich. He was one instrument maker among many in Paris, all competing for the attention of orchestras and private buyers. 

JAY COCKBURN: So he came up with a plan to secure his own niche in a competitive market. He went after a client so huge–so wealthy–that their business could set him up for life. 

ROMAN MARS: Because since time immemorial there has been one tried and true way for an entrepreneur to make a ton of money. Adolphe Sax wanted to land a military contract. 

STEPHEN COTTRELL: If you could get a contract with the French military to supply brass instruments or brass wind instruments, then that was gonna be the backbone of your business. You were gonna sell far more instruments to the French military than you ever were going to the orchestras in Paris. 

ROMAN MARS: If cannons and cannons and cavalry were how a country demonstrated military prowess, then music was how it showed its cultural might. And France was lagging behind. 

JAY COCKBURN: Austria and Prussia’s military bands were leading the way with fancy new valve technology in their brass instruments, which made for loud, impressive displays. 

ROMAN MARS: France’s military band, on the other hand, was still dominated by woodwind instruments, which are tuneful and elegant but not loud enough to fill a parade ground. 

JAY COCKBURN: In 1845, the French Ministry of War established a commission to investigate improvements to military bands, and Sax decided that he was going to hit it big by designing the perfect instrument to lift French military bands out of the toilettes. Adolphe thought he could have the best of both brass and woodwinds, with a little tinkering. His starting point was this other instrument that was common in bands at the time, called the “ophicleide.”

STEPHEN COTTRELL: It’s a little bit difficult to describe. If you turned a trumpet on its end with the bell pointing up to the sky and then made it about 30 times bigger, you’ve got the general shape of an ophicleide. 

ROMAN MARS: The ophicleide had this going for it: it was loud. But other than that, it was pretty much a dud. It’s a big honking instrument that was difficult to play in tune. 

JAY COCKBURN: This is a recording of an ophicleide I found online. 

[OPHICLEIDE]

JAY COCKBURN: The composer Hector Berlioz said, “The quality of these low sounds is 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.”

ROMAN MARS: The ophicleide was usually part of the low bass end of the orchestra, where the tuba sits today. 

STEPHEN COTTRELL: And so Sax saw this area of the bands and the orchestras as needing attention. And he therefore looked at the ophicleide, and he experimented with the ophicleide. 

JAY COCKBURN: Adolphe Sax borrowed from his earlier project, the bass clarinet, and created a sort of hybrid brass and reed instrument. 

STEPHEN COTTRELL: He quite literally took the brass mouthpiece that was on the ophicleide and replaced it with a bass clarinet mouthpiece. That’s what we believe he did in the late 1830s. And the reed mouthpiece would make a smoother, softer sound. It would make a richer harmonic spectrum.

JAY COCKBURN: Adolphe also placed the boreholes scientifically, the way he had with the bass clarinet. 

ROMAN MARS: Crucially, this wasn’t just one instrument. It was a whole family. 

JAY COCKBURN: Adolphe Sax was looking to improve the entire ensemble, and so he created families of similar instruments at different pitches. He’d already done this with the saxhorns and saxotrombas a few years before. The idea was to create a chorus of instruments working together, a little like a choir of human voices, with altos, tenors, sopranos, and bass all working together in harmony. And just like his saxhorns and saxotrombas, he named them after himself: the saxophones.

ROMAN MARS: Adolphe Sax patented his family of saxophones in 1846. There are eight figures on that patent, ranged by size and pitch. Some of them are straight. Some are more like an ophicleide. But right at the center of that lineup was an instrument with a bell-shaped horn, a reed mouthpiece, and an iconic S-shape. 

JAY COCKBURN: Adolphe had created a brand new kind of instrument–one that was light and sturdy. The S-shape, in particular, was easy to hold while marching. It was loud enough to carry over a parade ground, but with the rich harmonics and refined tone of a clarinet. This was the perfect instrument for a military band, and it sounded like this…

[SAXOPHONE]

JAY COCKBURN: This is the sound of a saxophone made by Adolphe Sax himself in the 1860s. 

[SAXOPHONE]

JAY COCKBURN: This antique is being played by Dr. Paul Cohen. When I was reading about the development of the saxophone, pretty much every article was either written by or had contributions from Paul. After I called him up, he invited me to visit his saxophone museum in New Jersey. 

PAUL COHEN: When saxophonists come here, it’s like a saxophone petting zoo because they’re allowed to play all these instruments if they bring their mouthpieces. 

JAY COCKBURN: How many saxophones do you have? 

PAUL COHEN: I stopped counting a while ago, but it’s around 250. Some people say that it’s the largest private collection in the world. 

JAY COCKBURN: The Adolphe Sax original is a beautiful instrument. The brass has barely dulled with age. It carries Adolphe Sax’s maker’s mark engraved next to some ornate cursive script detailing the address of his workshop in Paris. 

JAY COCKBURN: How does it feel as a player compared to your modern performance saxophone? 

PAUL COHEN: It’s so light, and the sound is so transparent. I feel like I’m playing on a cloud. 

JAY COCKBURN: Oh. 

PAUL COHEN: And I feel that if I play too hard I’m gonna fall through the cloud. 

JAY COCKBURN: That is a lovely metaphor. 

JAY COCKBURN: Sax had created and patented a whole line of saxophones and saxhorns. But that didn’t mean he’d sealed the deal for the French military contract. He still needed to present his inventions to the military and convince them that these instruments were the key to bringing their band to the next level. 

ROMAN MARS: Military bands, like the orchestra, can be stuffy, conservative places. You can imagine how they might bristle at a brash young Belgian who slapped his name on a trumpet and called it a “saxhorn,” especially when he starts saying that the military should abandon their oboes and bassoons for all these saxtraments that he just made up. 

JAY COCKBURN: But like any good entrepreneur, Adolphe Sax did a lot of networking in Paris. And he made friends with some very influential composers and writers who really did believe in the superiority of his instruments. They wrote about Adolphe’s creations in the musical press, helping him make the case for his vision of a new type of military band. 

ROMAN MARS: So there was this ongoing debate in the press about what kind of instruments should be in the French military. Ultimately, the commission decided to let the public settle the matter in the only way a musical debate can be settled. 

JAY COCKBURN: A battle of the bands! 

The French Ministry of War set up a competition to find out whether Sax’s instruments could actually outmatch the instrumentation of a conventional military band. 

ROMAN MARS: On one side, the Sax band, full of saxhorns and saxophones, led by Adolphe Sax. His supporters were known as–no surprises here–Saxons. 

JAY COCKBURN: On the other side, a traditional military band, which at the time was woodwind-heavy, with two oboes, two bassoons, and 13 clarinets. 

ROMAN MARS: Adolphe Sax did away with those oboes and bassoons, and he kept just seven clarinets. In their place, he had 18 saxhorns and two saxophones, as well as some more modern trumpets and trombones. 

JAY COCKBURN: This was a big deal. The press was full of rumors about nefarious forces trying to interfere. 

STEPHEN COTTRELL: Now there are stories that people tried to sabotage Sax’s bands. They bought off some of his instrumentalists. They tried to find ways in which the saxophones couldn’t be played, etc., etc.

JAY COCKBURN: This kind of thing seemed to happen to Sax all the time. Throughout his career, you can find wild tales of shadowy enemies and their plans to thwart him. There’s one story of a bomb being planted in Sax’s bed. I found another story of one of Sax’s top employees being murdered, stabbed through the heart by an assassin who mistook him for his boss… Apparently… These stories are possibly true? And lots of them originate in sensational newspaper reports or biographies where the original source was Sax himself or his close family. But it’s clear that he had made a lot of enemies. And on the day of the Battle of the Bands, seven of Sax’s musicians really didn’t show up. They were apparently–apparently–bribed to stay out of the way. But that didn’t stop Sax, who played some of the instruments himself… apparently…

ROMAN MARS: On April 22, 1845, two bands, two different sets of instruments, and one audience showed up at the Champ de Mars, a long public park in Paris. Today the park is home to the Eiffel Tower, but back then its focal point was the École Militaire, the military school. 

The press had drummed up public interest, so the bands were facing a large crowd. 

JAY COCKBURN: Among the audience were members of the Military Commission, journalists, artists, and senior officers. They were there to judge the quality of the sound and how well it carried outdoors. 

ROMAN MARS: The two bands played the same pieces of music, one after the other. The traditional woodwind-centric band went first. 

JAY COCKBURN: Then it was the turn of the rousing horns of the Sax band. 

STEPHEN COTTRELL: Sax’s instruments would have been more homogenous. They would have sounded better together, in part, because he was making most or all of them. And so the brass instruments were all made to his specifications. He added the saxophones in, which would have given more volume to the band. So, clearly volume is an important issue here. 

JAY COCKBURN: These were louder instruments–probably in closer harmony because of Sax’s scientific approach–played outdoors by military bands. And the Sax band had much more bass presence thanks to his saxhorns. 

ROMAN MARS: After four hours of performance, the audience cheered for both bands. But the cheers for Adolphe Sax’s Sax band were louder–loud enough for him to be declared the winner of the battle. That seal of approval was enough for the French military. Adolphe Sax won that sweet, sweet military contract. 

JAY COCKBURN: I’ve got a properly French quote translated from a newspaper here. “A Stradivarius violin compared with a violin from the village. A glass of generous Bordeaux next to an adulterated beverage made in Suresne,” that’s a suburb of Paris. “That is the difference which exists between the old music and that proposed by Monsieur Sax.”

STEPHEN COTTRELL: He won the contract to supply the French military with instrumentation for their bands that was more along the lines he wanted. So, for a while then, Sax’s business is booming. 

JAY COCKBURN: Sax’s victory meant that he had a huge influx of cash and a steady customer. A standard military band was now required to include his inventions. No more oboes and bassoons, now there were saxhorns and saxophones. He even made some technical improvements to the other brass instruments and sold his own versions of those as well. 

ROMAN MARS: Military life was hard on instruments and they needed to be replaced often. All this added up to big business for Sax. 

JAY COCKBURN: But despite his success, Adolphe’s hubris and his enemies eventually caught up to him. He got tied up in expensive lawsuits over the patents for his instruments. The saxophone patents did hold up. But when France lost the Franco Prussian War, the military downsized its 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. 

ROMAN MARS: Adolphe Sax’s collection of over 400 musical instruments was taken from him and sold to pay off his debts. 

STEPHEN COTTRELL: He would have been collecting those instruments because they really represented what he wanted to know about musical instruments. I think they would have really meant something to him. And so, although there was relatively little monetary value in them, emotionally that would have hurt because he’d spent a lifetime building up that collection–keeping them carefully. And to see them all sold off to other people like that would have probably hurt as much as anything else that happened. 

JAY COCKBURN: That final bankruptcy was in 1877. He spent the last 17 years of his life scraping by, begging friends and family for money. 

ROMAN MARS: Antoine-Joseph “Adolphe” Sax died of pneumonia in absolute poverty in Paris on February 7, 1894. 

JAY COCKBURN: After a lifetime of work by Adolphe Sax, his instrument was no longer a commercial success. But he still earned a permanent place in history. There are statues of him in Dinant where he was born. 

ROMAN MARS: Those statues probably wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for what happened next, an ocean away. That’s after the break. 

[AD BREAK]

JAY COCKBURN: Even as the French military was pulling back funding and saxophone sales in Europe were falling off, the instrument was gaining traction in the United States. The saxophone’s place in the U.S., however, was not just in the military. It was marketed as a cheap, fun instrument that was relatively easy to play. And people loved it. 

ROMAN MARS: In fact, in the early 20th century, the U.S. experienced what became known as a saxophone craze. American saxophone manufacturers churned out dozens of novelty instruments. 

JAY COCKBURN: One of them glides like a slide whistle. Another is so small it looks absurd to play. Paul Cohen has quite a few of them at his saxophone museum in New Jersey. I recorded Paul playing a bunch of novelty saxophones. They sound amazing. I promise you that we’ll play them later. There’s even one that scares my cat. Pretty soon these saxophones were being played in circuses, in vaudeville acts, and in people’s homes. 

PAUL COHEN: It was marketed as a great social tool. “Play the saxophone and be more popular!”

JAY COCKBURN: Would it be like, you know, you go around your friend’s house and it would be quite likely they’d have a saxophone there? 

PAUL COHEN: More than likely they’d have two. Home music-making was a big deal. And we have many pictures, in catalogs and articles, that show the family surrounding the piano and the saxophone player looking over the shoulder, playing off the piano part, participating in the musical merriment. 

ROMAN MARS: The saxophone craze lasted from 1915 to around the time the Depression hit. With less money in people’s pockets, there was less demand for wacky saxophones. 

JAY COCKBURN: But the saxophones didn’t disappear. And 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. 

PAUL COHEN: When we got to the late 1920s, jazz in a big band form was starting to become the happening music and music ensemble. 

LAKECIA BENJAMIN: Depression’s here, but we’re all still drinking and partying. Right? ’30s come along. Now the band’s job is to keep the dancers on the dance floor. 

JAY COCKBURN: This is Lakecia Benjamin. She’s played saxophone with Prince, Stevie Wonder, and Alicia Keys. And she’s been nominated for six Grammys. But, like, she’s played saxophone with Prince, and I feel like that alone is enough of an intro. She says that 1930s jazz was all about getting people moving. 

LAKECIA BENJAMIN: It’s different when it’s your job to keep the party going. And the instrument that they called on for that was a saxophone. There were even sax battles. People would go and just see Count Basie Band versus Duke Ellington’s band, and they would just completely try to murder each other. Their saxophone playing was real raunchy, like a… I’ll just sing it even though it’s gonna sound terrible. It’d be real like, “Da da da da da da–“

[COTTON TAIL SAX SOLO]

JAY COCKBURN: As jazz evolved, the saxophone wasn’t just a part of the horn section, it became a soloist’s instrument, commanding the stage and forcing you to pay attention to the player. 

LAKECIA BENJAMIN: So, I’m not sure if that’s because all the men are in war or wherever they are. But the small group comes and they… I guess who’s the founder of that? It’s debatable. We all say Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonius Monk were the three. And they invent this style of music called “bebop.” So we go from big band to bebop. 

[KOKO] 

JAY COCKBURN: That’s Charlie Parker playing Koko.

LAKECIA BENJAMIN: And this is really what we think of the saxophone as–really intellectual music, fast notes… And they’re, like, virtuosos. And you can say, from that moment on, no one ever danced at jazz again. 

ROMAN MARS: The way jazz instrumentalists used the saxophone showcased the flexibility Adolphe Sax had aimed to perfect in his instrument. While traditional saxophonists used the big brash tones, some jazz players leaned into the saxophone’s ability to be smooth and nuanced, almost mimicking the human voice. 

LAKECIA BENJAMIN: I guess I’m such a jazz funk saxophone player that, to me, I would be inhibiting myself. So, a good example of that is classical saxophones. Here’s how my voice sounds. This is how it sounds classical. [NASALLY] “Hey. How are you? How’s everybody doing? I play a classical saxophone.” [NORMAL] But no, this is my real– [NASALLY] “Stop, stop, stop!” You see, so I felt… I just felt oppressed because I’m just like, “Why can’t I play like this when this is how I talk?” [NASALLY] “Why do you want me to do this? Please. Please, I want to play jazz.”

JAY COCKBURN: By this point, the saxophone had come a long way from its roots in Europe. It was no longer the brash, young upstart trying to make it big in the French military. Over the course of a century, the instrument had woven itself into the fabric of life in the U.S., traveling with concert bands and hanging out in living rooms across the country. It was an iconic American instrument. And now, with jazz, it was a Black American’s instrument. 

LAKECIA BENJAMIN: It gets more political because it was founded by African Americans. So, whenever you’ve got a group of people that are founding a music that starts off with them oppressed, it’s already the music of revolution. 

ROMAN MARS: The saxophone’s new associations did not come without pushback. Some, mostly white musicians, felt that the saxophone shouldn’t be “debased” by jazz. They thought it was a “proper” instrument for “proper” people. 

JAY COCKBURN: I’ve got this magazine column here written by a couple of saxophone purists in 1917. Let me just read a bit. “God save us from the hideous catcalling that is so much in vogue at present, termed ‘jazzing.’ The listener who hears some of these jazz players and has never before heard a saxophone is liable to form some very erroneous opinions of the much talked-of instrument. Really, the jazzer should be subject to the same quarantine restrictions as if he had the foot and mouth disease.”

ROMAN MARS: In the first half of the 20th century, jazz and, by extension, the saxophone represented the forbidden. They were synonymous with sin. 

LAKECIA BENJAMIN: When prohibition is going on, you go to the jazz place to get the liquor. If you’re trying to drink and party and fornicate all night, that’s where you go. And the music that’s playing for that is the blues and jazz. That’s where the mafia is, so it’s associated with them. And it’s funded for a long time–jazz is funded–by people that are doing wrong. Like, even in my own household, my grandmother didn’t want me to play the saxophone. She told me, “If you’re going to play that in here, you better learn some church songs on this saxophone.” So I’m in there trying to practice my Duke Ellington and also playing Holy, Holy, Holy. So I think if you’re from that generation, any sound of it or any recollection of it you just associate with “my daughter’s going to hell.”

JAY COCKBURN: This reputation for being a Black instrument–an instrument associated with smoky clubs and sex–it’s that reputation that followed the saxophone back to its birthplace in Europe. This association was strong enough that the saxophone ran afoul when the Nazis came to power in the 1930s. 

DARIUS JONES: Jazz music was considered negro music. 

JAY COCKBURN: This is Darius Jones. He’s a composer, a saxophonist, and assistant professor of music at Wesleyan University. 

DARIUS JONES: Nazis don’t, you know… They want to ban everything. They’re not really about the fullness of the human experience. And I feel like the saxophone really was about that. It was really about this sort of full sense of expression. 

JAY COCKBURN: The Nazis banned what they called “Entartete Musik,” “degenerate music.” That included anything with excesses in tempo, “Jewishly gloomy lyrics,” I am quoting the Nazis there… They even had an exhibition showcasing all the styles of art that were supposedly morally terrible. It was, apparently, much more popular than the one showcasing fine German art. 

ROMAN MARS: There’s a poster from that degenerate exhibition showing a racist character of a Black man holding a saxophone with a Star of David pinned to his lapel. He’s playing a saxophone with the German words for “degenerate music” printed over him. 

JAY COCKBURN: The Soviet Union also sent saxophonists to the Gulag for being too bourgeois–too Western. The saxophone was excluded from the Vatican, and then by churches the world over, including in the U.S. 

ROMAN MARS: It might be hard to imagine that, for a while in the late 20th century, the saxophone was the boogieman of fascist regimes. 

JAY COCKBURN: Then again, maybe it’s not. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the instrument had already done some dramatic shape-shifting. It had been an obscure money-making scheme, a fallen military instrument, a novelty item, and a powerful symbol of Black American music. So why not enemy number one of several countries and the Catholic Church? 

ROMAN MARS: But things that were once taboo often eventually go mainstream. And the saxophone was no exception. Instead of remaining a symbol of rebellion, it began to ripple out into a variety of genres. 

LAKECIA BENJAMIN: In the ’80s, especially since I’m a New Yorker, we’re going to start to introduce hip hop. So they’ll take, like, an eight-bar Donald Byrd song and start their song with that. “Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum.”

JAY COCKBURN: If Diggable Planets and other hip hop artists put saxophone to hip hop, artists like James Brown brought it into mainstream pop music. 

The ’80s were really peak saxophone. The sax became so pervasive that it kind of jumped the shark into cheesiness. 

DARIUS JONES: It was of a time, like, you know, leather pants… Like, you know that image of this ponytail, just playing with sax. He’s all slicked up and stuff. 

JAY COCKBURN: Think Careless Whisper. 

In the end, the scorching sax solo faded out of fashion, and the saxophone was so ubiquitous that it became kind of just another instrument–one you might pick up in music class at school or a bit of extra flavor added to the standard modern rock or pop lineup. Guitar, drums, bass, keys, and… Oh, why not a sax? 

Still, I’d argue that this image of the saxophone is incomplete. It doesn’t do justice to the versatile, flexible instrument that Adolphe Sax put into the world. 

LAKECIA BENJAMIN: When people think of love and they think of an instrument, they usually think of some saxophone player coming out and seducing somebody. When it’s time to really shred and rock out, you could really crank that thing up and take it all the way to Metallica land. So, for me, it’s just the most versatile way to be all your complete self. 

JAY COCKBURN: The saxophone’s brilliance has always been in its versatility. When Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone, he designed it to be a marriage of loud and soft–bold and smooth. The saxophone is loud enough to hold its own on any stage, but it’s also soft and nuanced enough to rise and fall like the human voice. 

PAUL COHEN: I feel that I’m playing something that is so connected to me internally and physically that it feels like it’s an extension of my inner soul. 

JAY COCKBURN: The sound, on a fundamental level, might be made by air vibrating inside a mathematically appropriate metal tube. But how it makes you feel–that’s all about the human who’s blowing on that reed, pressing those keys, and feeling the sax appear. 

ROMAN MARS: After the break, Jay is gonna play us some of his favorite novelty saxophones from Paul Cohen’s saxophone museum. 

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: So we’re back with Jay Cockburn. Jay! I hear you have some weird saxophones to play me. 

JAY COCKBURN: I absolutely do. So, we mentioned the saxophone craze and I promised you I’d play you some recordings of the kind of weird and wonderful instruments that Paul Cohen has in his sax museum. 

ROMAN MARS: I’m really excited to hear weird saxes. But first I want you to paint the scene for me because I’m very curious about Dr. Paul Cohen and his saxophone museum. It sounds like this fascinating place. 

JAY COCKBURN: Totally. So, the museum is in Englewood, New Jersey–so pretty easy to get to from New York. It’s basically just the lower half of his house. And when you walk in, you’re just surrounded by saxophones of all shapes, sizes, and materials. And you can actually go there, too. If you’re a bit of a saxophone geek, just search for Paul Cohen online. You can find his email address. And if you send him a message, he will invite you to view his collection, too. If you can play, bring your own mouthpiece and he’ll let you have a go on all these saxophones. 

ROMAN MARS: I love that. Saxophones shouldn’t be just displayed on a wall, they should be played. They should live the life that they’re supposed to have. 

JAY COCKBURN: Yeah, and as well as being a professor, he is a professional musician, too, so he uses some of these instruments himself in his work. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, so I’m ready to hear some saxophones and weird saxophones. So what do you want to play first? 

JAY COCKBURN: Okay, first up is a slide saxophone. So you’ve heard of a slide guitar, I’m sure, but there is also a slide saxophone. And so instead of having loads of holes and keys all over it, this is just a straight tube. This one’s actually made of wood, and there is just one long hole down the side of it. And the player kind of presses down a long strap–like literally just a fabric strap–to make that hole longer or shorter, which means you can do a glissando or a slide. And this is how it sounds. 

[SLIDE SAXOPHONE] 

JAY COCKBURN: I think it sounds kinda like a theremin. You know the weird electric instrument?

ROMAN MARS: Totally. Or the fanciest slide whistle you’ve ever heard. 

JAY COCKBURN: [LAUGHS] Yeah. It’s a really expensive kazoo or something like that. 

ROMAN MARS: So what do you have next? 

JAY COCKBURN: So, I have the extremes of the saxophone now–the biggest and the smallest. So Adolphe Sax designed a whole family of saxophones at different pitches. But later on, manufacturers really took the saxophone to sort of almost comic sizes. And Paul has collected, like, all of them. He has this teeny tiny little guy that honestly looks like a toy but is actually a one-of-a-kind curved sopranino. So that’s higher than soprano. And these are usually straight, but the one Paul has looks like a really intricate toy saxophone. And here it is. 

[CURVED SOPRANINO]

ROMAN MARS: That’s delightful. I’m picturing his big grown man hands on this tiny little thing. Is that what it looks like?

JAY COCKBURN: Yeah. That’s exactly what it looks like. It looks… I mean, this is a respectable instrument, and we should give it the degree of respect that it deserves. You know, I believe that was a solo from a Gershwin piece actually. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, no, it’s beautiful. It sounded so good. 

JAY COCKBURN: It’s just delightful. I love it so much. Okay, so at the other end of the spectrum, we have the biggest saxophone. And this is the reason that the study door you can see behind me is actually closed right now. I have two cats, and this one freaks them out. So this is the subcontrabass. 

[SUBCONTRABASS] 

ROMAN MARS: Oh, that’s awesome. I can see why that freaks them out, though. It sounds like an old truck idling outside your house when it gets to the lowest levels. 

JAY COCKBURN: So that is the subcontrabass. That is the lowest, largest type of saxophone. It goes lower than the lowest end of a piano. And it is huge. Like, this thing is being played on a stand because it’s taller than Paul is. And it’s gorgeous though. It’s this beautiful black with brass keywork. And if you’re in the room with it being played or if you just want to crank your speakers, it kind of shakes your guts around and makes you reconsider what you had for lunch. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Yeah, like, it’s definitely something you feel in your sternum when it plays. Okay, so blow my mind. What’s the weirdest saxophone you saw there? 

JAY COCKBURN: Okay, so, the weirdest one I found in Paul’s saxophone museum was this. Take a look at this picture. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, so this is a black and white photo of a man. He’s kind of sitting, perched on a little seat, and he has a stand where three saxophones are affixed in position. And he seems to be playing them all at once. 

JAY COCKBURN: He is! He’s playing them all. He’s playing one with each hand. And then there’s a middle one that he’s also blowing that is operated with the foot pedals you can maybe see on the floor there. And he blows them all at once. He was called Billy True. He was a pipe fitter at a steel works. But he was also known as the one man saxophone section. And Paul actually has this triple saxophone contraption in his museum. 

ROMAN MARS: And so can Paul play this thing?

JAY COCKBURN: No. And I do not blame him for not trying. But I do have a recording of Billy True playing it. 

INTRODUCTION: All right, Billy True playing three saxophones at the same time. 

[TRIPLE SAXOPHONE]

ROMAN MARS: I mean, that one strikes me as more of a ridiculous novelty more than anything. But that’s great. That’s a wacky sax. I like it. 

JAY COCKBURN: Okay, I’ve got two more that are wacky but are not strictly saxophones. They are not in Paul’s saxophone museum, but they are from the mind of Adolphe Sax himself because, back when our man, Adolphe, was trying really hard for that military contract, he came up with some truly unhinged ideas. And this one is a real “hear me out.” The Saxocannon. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, so are we talking about just an instrument here? Or is this actually a weapon? 

JAY COCKBURN: It’s a cannon with Sax’s name on it. Yeah. Like, a giant cannon… 

ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHING] He’s branching out.

JAY COCKBURN: He’s branching out! He wanted the military contract so much he was like, “Look, my tubes don’t have to just fire sounds. They can also fire balls of metal.” And in this case, it was a 30 foot wide shell. So, in theory, it would generate an explosion big enough to level a city. 

ROMAN MARS: Wow. 

JAY COCKBURN: I’m kind of glad he stuck to instruments in the end. Yeah. Okay. So, one last absurd sax invention–also huge. This one is a train with an organ on the back. It would have been called the Saxotonnerre, which I believe translates literally as “Sax thunder.” Or maybe it’s “thunder Sax.”

ROMAN MARS: Why would anyone want or need an organ the size of a train? 

JAY COCKBURN: To scare the Prussian army, of course. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh, right. Yeah. 

JAY COCKBURN: You know, why else would anyone want a massive organ? That Prussian army–always causing trouble. The idea was that they’d just blast sound at them, like the Scottish did with their bagpipes at the English. And I can say from experience that one worked. I should say that these two sax stories, the Saxotonnerre and the Saxcannon, are a bit like lots of Adolphe Sax stories–kind of shrouded in myth and lacking reliable primary sources. But I have spent a lot of time with Adolphe over the last few months, and I’ve got to say, it sounds like something he’d do. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Yeah, because he just likes to take an invention and, like, make it bigger–more ridiculous–maybe add some valves and some scientific thinking to it, and then just slap his name on the front of it. I mean, that’s definitely an Adolphe Sax move. 

Well, this was so much fun, Jay. I enjoyed the story so much, and I enjoyed this tour through even weirder saxophones. This is fantastic. 

JAY COCKBURN: Thanks for having me, Roman. It’s been a joy. 

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was reported this week by Jay Cockburn and edited by Kelly Prime. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real with Kayleigh “Kmoy” Malloy on Saxophone. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia.

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. 

The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. 

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.