Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) WEB Du Bois inspired Sonny Rollins to create music to empower black people. 'If I played jazz, then I was automatically connected with my black roots,' he says. The saxophone is so central to jazz, he says the instrument 'almost represents' it. 'Jazz is really a black artform,' Rollins says. The saxophone symbolised racism in Germany and fear of imperialism in Russia, but in the US, when jazz music arrived, it became a voice for black American liberation. Orchestras in the Soviet Union were forced to pull their saxophones, saxophonists had to hand over their instruments, and players were arrested, imprisoned and even exiled. 'The saxophone was the embodiment of jazz, which in turn was the embodiment of bourgeois American imperialist culture, so that would be a good enough reason to ban the saxophone,' Ingham says. In the 1930s, Stalin's Soviet Union also persecuted the saxophone. 'Ecclesiastical authorities insisted that the saxophone movement be omitted rather than let the instrument's profane voice speak within the sacred building,' Ingham says.

The instrument has also been banned in churches - starting with the Vatican in 1914 - perhaps for its association with some of the more sexually suggestive dance moves of the early 1900s. It became difficult, and dangerous, to play the saxophone in Germany, with reports of SS soldiers knocking saxophones out of players' mouths. 'The white supremacist concept of the Nazis and the desire to have a pure Aryan culture meant that they didn't want anything to do with jazz because of its African-American history and connotations,' Ingham says. One 1938 poster advertising a 'degenerate music' exhibition featured a black, monkey-like caricature, wearing a Star of David badge and playing the saxophone. The instrument fell under what Nazis referred to as 'Entartete Kunst', or 'degenerate art', which saw many artforms banned. More sold in the mid-to-late-1920s than electric guitars in the 1960s.īut popularity brought with it serious - and seriously powerful - detractors.īy 1933, when the Nazis took power in Germany, the saxophone had become a symbol of jazz music and inextricably intertwined with African-American culture.

When the saxophone was picked up by dance bands of the early 1900s, the instrument became a star. ( Getty: Zander & Labisch/ullstein bild) The saxophone as 'degenerate' Jealous rivals tried to murder the saxophone's bright young inventor, Adolphe Sax.

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