Sax History The saxophone was invented by Antoine-Joseph (Adolph) Sax. He was born in Dinant, Belgium on November 6, 1814. Charles-Joseph Sax, his father, was a manufacturer who built a factory for woodwind and brass instruments. From his father he developed the technique and creativity needed for the trade. At Brussels Conservatory he studied flute and clarinet and soon developed his own ideas for improving the instruments. While refining the bass clarinet he began to form plans on building a new instrument. The instrument was a cross between the woodwinds and brass. It would be a bridge between the woodwind and brass sections that would blend not only with both, but also with strings. It was made of brass, yet had a mouthpiece and body fairly similar to the clarinet. The saxophone was born. The Saxophone Receives Its Patent In 1841, Adolph first displayed his saxophone. Then in 1842, he moved to Paris in order to reach a broader audience. There he also began his own instrument making business. The saxophone was given its official 15-year patent in 1846.

Trumpet History The trumpet is simply an extension of the idea of amplifying one's own voice. While it contains rich, pure sounds all its own, it is interesting to note the history and ideas of the trumpet, and its correlation to our human instrument. If you see a seashell on the beach, and notice that the wind makes a sound when it hits the shell, you are watching the power of air in a confined space. If you watch wind blow over a glass bottle and moan, that is a wind instrument in action. Early human tribes used shells and horns to call each other. As a wind instrument is modified on the outside, its sound modifies as well. The earliest drawing of trumpets were found in two places: the tomb of King Tut and on the wall of a South American tribal spot in Peru. The notations in King Tut's tomb were crude but accurate, depicting a long instrument with a flared neck. Valves were a long time in coming after this introduction, so trumpets limited to the notes of the Harmonic Series of a particular key. For this reason, they were used by the Egyptians simply as indicators, or as battle signals. Greece, China, Rome, and many other ancient peoples had their own idea of what the trumpet was to look and sound like. It existed in many different ways throughout all of these cultures, and many others. Tibetians have a long, sloped tube of almost 15 feet long, while certain regions of the Andes have funnels of one inch that create noise. Clearly, wind instruments have many different ways to make sound. At a very early point in our history, trumpets also became associated with Biblical lore, especially that of Christianity. The sound of trumpets is meant to represent angels, war, and the end of the World. During the Renaissance, several versions of the trumpet began to appear. one version included a piece that could be placed over the mouth of a wind instrument to stop air. Another instrument, called the slide trumpet, had a slide very similar to that of the trombone. The trumpet began to be used to playing and pitches, instead of announcements and war. In seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe, the trumpet gained great popularity, and began to resemble, in turn, the clarinet, the flute and the French horn. These instruments later branched off and became wind pieces of their own right. Valves were added in the nineteenth century, making the trumpet an instrument near to the human voice in versatility. Instead of the clumsy sounds and keys heard before, the trumpet was now a sonorous, smooth instrument that could carry an orchestra. This is the basis of the trumpet today as a leading member of an orchestra. While the trumpet is very popular in its common form in the United States, it is important to note all of the variations of the trumpet that exist today. In the Middle East, they prefer a sound much different to ours, as is the same with Asia and even Russia and South America.

Big Band History There are two distinct periods in the history of popular bands. Big bands, then typically consisting of 10–13 pieces, came to dominate popular music in the middle 1920s. At that time they usually played a sweet form of jazz that involved very little improvisation, including one or more violins, which were mostly dropped after the mid-1930s. Typical of the genre were such popular artists as Paul Whiteman and Ted Lewis. Many of these artists changed styles or retired after the introduction of swing music. Although unashamedly commercial, these bands often featured front-rank jazz musicians - for example Paul Whiteman employed Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer. Towards the end of the twenties, a new form of Big Band emerged which was more authentically 'jazz', in that more space was given to improvised soloing. The two major centres in this development were New York City and Kansas City. In the former, a sophisticated approach to arranging predominated, first in the work of Don Redman for the Fletcher Henderson band, later in the work of Duke Ellington for his Cotton Club orchestra, and Walter 'Foots' Thomas for Cab Calloway's. Meanwhile in Kansas City and across the Southwest, an earthier, bluesier style was developed by such bandleaders as Benny Moten and Jesse Stone. Swing music began appearing in the early 1930s, distinguished by a more supple feel than the more literal 4/4 of earlier jazz and a walking bass - Walter Page is often credited with developing this, though isolated earlier examples exist (eg by Wellman Braud on Ellington's Washington Wabble from 1927). This type of music flourished through the early 1950s, although there was little mass audience for it until around 1936. After that time, big bands rose to prominence playing swing music and held a major role in defining swing as a distinctive style. Western Swing musicians also formed very popular big bands during the same period.[1][2][3] By this time the Big Band was such a dominant force in jazz that the older generation found they either had to adapt to it or simply retire - with no market for small-group recordings (made worse by a depression-era industry reluctant to take risks), some musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines fronted their own bands, whilst others, like Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver, lapsed into obscurity. Later bandleaders pioneered the performance of various Brazilian and Afro-Cuban styles with the traditional big band instrumentation, and big bands led by arranger Gil Evans, saxophonist John Coltrane (on the album Ascension from 1965) and electric bassist Jaco Pastorius introduced cool jazz, free jazz and jazz fusion, respectively, to the big band domain. Modern big bands can be found playing all styles of jazz music. Some large contemporary European jazz ensembles play mostly avant-garde jazz using the instrumentation of the big bands. Examples include the Vienna Art Orchestra, founded in 1977, and the Italian Instabile Orchestra, active in the 1990s.