Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Adolphe Sax, pictured ca. 1842 Rothman is managing editor at TIME. It took decades—a century even, depending how you count—for Adolphe Sax’s invention to take its ...

When Belgian Instrument Maker Adolphe Sax stuck a reed into a conical brass tube and patented the hybrid in 1846, he contributed a new instrument to the military band. In time his saxophone traveled ...

It is a tiresome, but unfortunately largely accurate, cliché, that it is impossible to name 10 famous Belgians. Jacques Brel, René Magritte and Hergé may spring fairly easily to mind but a more ...

Coleman Hawkins may have helped to thrust the tenor saxophone out of the novelty arena and into the anti-gravity space of jazz improvisation, but even he could not have predicted how the tenor would ...

Coleman Hawkins, known as "The Hawk" or "Bean," basically invented tenor sax as we know it, all the way down to Bill Clinton playing his way to office. After making many recordings with various groups ...

Don Stevens is that rare musician who will never moan about not being taken seriously. But when you start a group called the Nuclear Whales Saxophone Orchestra, and your own instrument is a Monstro ...

The buckles make a sharp snapping sound, like a spattering of gunfire, as Will Compton opens a black case and lifts out a tarnished brass horn. He beams as he holds up the weathered instrument in his ...