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 ...

Cecil “Big Jay” McNeely, whose honking tenor saxophone helped define Los Angeles rhythm and blues and set the stage for the rock ’n’ roll explosion of the 1950s, has died. He was 91. A singular figure ...

John Ellis is one of New York’s premiere tenor saxophone voices. With more than 150 album credits as a sideman, John has recorded with a wide variety of artists such as Charlie Hunter, Robert Glasper, ...

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.

Sonny Rollins, one of the greatest living practitioners of jazz, bought the saxophone he still uses today on West 48th Street in Manhattan in the 1970s. Back then, the small block was dotted with so ...