Jay Coburn

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.

Play the saxophone, it'd be more popular.

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?

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.

This is Lakeisha Benjamin.

She's played saxophone with Prince, with 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.

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.

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 US, traveling with concert bands and hanging out in living rooms across the country.