50 Fun Facts About Saxophone

Plas Johnson's tenor saxophone plays the slinky Henry Mancini theme of which 1960s film comedy?

The Pink Panther. Mancini wrote the tune with Johnson's sound in mind, and when the second take ended the whole studio orchestra applauded, something Johnson said session players never do.

The saxophone belongs to which family of instruments?

Woodwind. Its body is brass, but its sound comes from a vibrating reed, and that mechanism, not the metal, decides which family an instrument belongs to.

Which French composer praised Sax's new saxophone in print in 1842?

Hector Berlioz. Sax had just arrived in Paris with almost no money when he showed him the instrument, and the long article of praise that followed in the Journal des Débats gave the unknown maker a famous champion.

Dinant, which lines its main bridge with painted saxophones in honour of native son Adolphe Sax, is in which country?

Belgium. Sax was only a baby when his family left Dinant for Brussels, yet the town still claims him, with a museum at his birthplace and bridge saxophones each painted for a different European country.

Of the two series of seven saxophones in Sax's patent, which pair of keys became standard?

B-flat and E-flat. The rival series never caught on, so every member of the modern saxophone family is pitched in one of those two keys and Sax's other seven designs are now rarities.

Which four saxophones are in widest modern use?

Soprano, alto, tenor, baritone. Sax patented 14 versions, meant for military bands and orchestras alike, but bands and quartets settled on just these four.

What closes the tone holes of a saxophone when a key is pressed?

Leather pads. Each is a disc of felt covered in leather, soft enough to seal its tone hole when the key comes down, and the largest on an alto is about five centimetres across.

What is the lowest written note on most modern saxophones?

Low B-flat. Sax's first instruments stopped a semitone higher, at B, until makers lengthened the bell and added a key; only the largest common size usually goes lower still, to A.

What is the saxophone's highest register called, the notes above its normal keyed range?

Altissimo. The word is Italian for 'highest', and because the keywork stops below these notes, players coax them out with special fingerings and fine control of the mouth and air.

Music for every size of saxophone, from the highest to the lowest, is written in which clef?

Treble. Every size is written as if it were the same instrument, so a given written note takes the same fingering on all of them and players can switch sizes without relearning.

Saxophone reeds are traditionally cut from the stalks of which plant?

Giant cane. Its hollow stalks reach full height in a single year, then are split lengthwise and shaved thin, and because the material is natural no two reeds play exactly alike.

A saxophone jumps an octave when overblown, but a clarinet rises by which interval?

A twelfth. A clarinet's near-cylindrical bore makes it leap an octave plus a fifth, so its registers need different fingerings; Sax chose a cone-shaped tube so that his would repeat.

Before inventing the saxophone, the young Adolphe Sax made his name with a new design of which instrument?

Bass clarinet. His version so impressed the conductor of the Paris Opera that he called the older ones barbarous, and the saxophone grew out of Sax's efforts to better its tone.

Which family of valved brass instruments, made by Adolphe Sax in the 1840s, paved the way for the euphonium?

Saxhorn. Sax did not invent the valved bugle it grew from, but his matched family outsold his rivals' so thoroughly that it took his name, and its bass member became the model for the euphonium.

Which illness did saxophone inventor Adolphe Sax survive in the 1850s?

Lip cancer. It was usually a death sentence at the time, yet a herbalist doctor's treatment cleared it, and Sax went on making instruments for decades afterwards.

Which misfortune befell saxophone inventor Adolphe Sax three times, in 1852, 1873 and 1877?

Bankruptcy. His workshop sold some 20,000 instruments between 1843 and 1860, yet rival makers fought his patents in court for years and the sales never kept him solvent.

Tenor saxophonist Stan Getz set off an American craze for which Brazilian style in the early 1960s?

Bossa nova. His 1962 album with guitarist Charlie Byrd made a hit of Desafinado and The Girl from Ipanema followed in 1964, yet Getz rarely went back to the style after those years.

John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley were the two saxophonists on which 1959 Miles Davis album?

Kind of Blue. Davis handed his sextet scales to improvise on instead of the usual chord changes, and Coltrane carried that modal approach into his own bands of the 1960s.

Which saxophone was sold to amateurs in the early 20th century because it could play straight from piano sheet music?

C melody. Pitched in C, it let a home player read the same notes as the pianist with no transposing, and makers sold it as a parlour instrument until the Great Depression ended production.

Which 1928 orchestral piece by Maurice Ravel gives solos to both the tenor and the soprano saxophone?

Boléro. Saxophones were unusual guests in an orchestra, but Ravel liked jazz, and the piece he wrote for dancer Ida Rubinstein passes one tune from solo to solo as it grows ever louder.

Which maker's Balanced Action saxophones of 1936 revolutionised the left-hand key mechanics?

Selmer. Seven years earlier the Paris firm had taken over Adolphe Sax's own company, and the key layout it went on to refine was copied until nearly every saxophone used it.

Coleman Hawkins made the tenor a jazz solo instrument during his 1923-34 stint with which bandleader?

Fletcher Henderson. Hawkins spent 11 years in his New York big band, and when Louis Armstrong joined it in 1924 the trumpeter's phrasing pushed Hawkins to streamline his own playing.

Alto saxophonist Charlie Parker became the icon of which jazz revolution in the 1940s?

Bebop. Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie worked the style out together in the mid-1940s, turning jazz from music for dancing into fast, intricate music for listening.

Which saxophone did Charlie Parker play at the 1953 Massey Hall concert in Toronto?

A plastic Grafton. Parker had pawned his own horn, so he was handed the budget acrylic alto for the night; in 1994 it sold at Christie's in London for about $144,000 and went on display in a jazz museum.

Where was Charlie Parker born in 1920?

Kansas City. Born on the Kansas side, he grew up across the state line in Missouri, where his mother bought him a saxophone and he was playing the city's nightclubs by his mid-teens.

Which John Coltrane album, recorded in December 1964, did he offer as praise to God?

A Love Supreme. Coltrane's liner notes trace it to a spiritual awakening he had in 1957, and the suite became one of his best-selling records.

Coltrane's 1961 album My Favorite Things was his first on which instrument?

Soprano saxophone. Jazz players had largely ignored the instrument, but Coltrane's waltz-time version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune became a radio hit and set off a revival.

Which saxophonist quit performing in 1959 and spent two years practising on New York's Williamsburg Bridge?

Sonny Rollins. His Lower East Side flat was too cramped to practise in, so he played on the bridge's walkway beside the subway trains, then named his 1962 comeback album The Bridge.

Tenor saxophone pioneer Coleman Hawkins was known as Hawk and by which other nickname?

Bean. Nobody is sure where the name came from, but fellow musicians used it for the man whose 1939 recording of Body and Soul became one of the most imitated solos in jazz.

Harry Carney played saxophone for 47 years in which bandleader's orchestra?

Duke Ellington. Carney joined as a 17-year-old in 1927 and was still there when Ellington died in 1974, and the band's sound was built upward from his deep, full tone.

Which New Orleans player was known in the 1920s for a saxophone that only became common in jazz decades later?

Sidney Bechet. He was a clarinettist until he came across the straight horn in London on a 1919 European tour, and he ended his life a celebrity in Paris.

What do saxophonists call the technique of inhaling through the nose while the cheeks keep a note sounding?

Circular breathing. The cheeks act as a small reserve, pushing stored air through the horn while the lungs refill, and players of the didgeridoo and other instruments hit on the same trick independently.

Raphael Ravenscroft played the wailing saxophone riff on which 1978 hit?

Baker Street. Gerry Rafferty's song made the session player's name, yet Ravenscroft said in 2011 that hearing it irritated him because his saxophone was slightly out of tune.

Steve Gregory's saxophone riff features on which 1984 hit sung by George Michael?

Careless Whisper. Michael wrote it on a bus at 17, and he went through a string of saxophonists in the studio before Gregory gave him the sound he wanted.

What Guinness World Record did Kenny G set in 1997?

Longest note ever recorded on a saxophone. He held it for 45 minutes and 47 seconds without a break, drawing air in through his nose while his cheeks kept the note going.

Which 1992 presidential candidate put on sunglasses and played saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show?

Bill Clinton. Trailing both President Bush and Ross Perot in the polls, he borrowed an aide's Ray-Bans and played Heartbreak Hotel with the house band the day after clinching the nomination.

Which member of the saxophone family does Lisa Simpson play?

Baritone. In the flashback episode Lisa's Sax, Homer gives up the $200 he had saved for an air conditioner during a heatwave to buy his gifted young daughter her first horn.

Boots Randolph's tune Yakety Sax became the chase music that closed which British comedy series?

The Benny Hill Show. Randolph modelled the tune on the sax solo in the Coasters' Yakety Yak, and after years of speeded-up chases it became comedy shorthand for slapstick.

Which two saxophonists played with the Rolling Stones and the E Street Band respectively?

Bobby Keys and Clarence Clemons. Keys blew the solo on Brown Sugar, and Clemons, 'the Big Man', liked to say a gust tore the club door off the night he first asked to sit in with Springsteen.

The 'Epic Sax Guy' meme began with a saxophone solo in which country's 2010 Eurovision entry?

Moldova. SunStroke Project finished only 22nd of 25 that night, but clips of Sergey Stepanov's solo drew tens of millions of views, and the band came back in 2017 to place third.

Dick Parry's saxophone solos on Money and Us and Them feature on which Pink Floyd album?

The Dark Side of the Moon. Parry was an old Cambridge friend of guitarist David Gilmour, so the band turned to him when it wanted a saxophone on just these two songs.

The soprillo, a piccolo-sized saxophone, is so small that its octave key is built into what?

The mouthpiece. The whole instrument is only about 30 centimetres long and sounds an octave above the soprano, so the upper octave vent has nowhere lower to go.

The E-flat tubax, a compact design launched by Benedikt Eppelsheim in 1999, plays the range of which saxophone?

Contrabass. Eppelsheim narrowed the bore and folded the tubing so tightly that it stands only about 114 centimetres tall and takes the reeds of a saxophone an octave higher.

The xaphoon, a keyless bamboo 'pocket sax' invented in the 1970s, comes from which US state?

Hawaii. Saxophonist Brian Wittman made the first one from a length of bamboo in 1972, then went on making them by hand on Maui from bamboo picked in the island's rain forests.

Which Hollywood star directed Bird, a 1988 biopic about saxophone great Charlie Parker?

Clint Eastwood. A lifelong jazz devotee and pianist, he cast Forest Whitaker as Parker, and the part won Whitaker the best actor prize at Cannes and made his name.

Which blind jazz musician played three saxophones at once?

Rahsaan Roland Kirk. The idea came to him in a dream at about 16, so he reworked two odd old horns, which he named the manzello and the stritch, to play alongside his tenor.

On a saxophone, what are the buttons where the fingers touch the keys traditionally made from?

Mother of pearl. Most makers now fit plastic instead, but the name has stuck: the little discs under the fingertips are still called key pearls.

Which alto saxophonist recorded Free Jazz in 1960 with two quartets improvising at once?

Ornette Coleman. He let eight musicians improvise freely together for close to 40 minutes, and the record deepened an already fierce argument over whether his music was genius or fakery.

Alto saxophonist Paul Desmond wrote which hit for the Dave Brubeck Quartet, first recorded in 1959?

Take Five. Desmond had given up on fitting a tune to drummer Joe Morello's five-beat pattern until Brubeck stitched his two melodies together, and it became a best-selling jazz single.

Saxophonist Grover Washington Jr.'s 1981 hit Just the Two of Us featured which soul singer?

Bill Withers. Washington's earlier hits had been instrumentals, so he brought Withers in to add words and a voice, and the song won its writers a Grammy.