Star saxophonist Courtney Pine's new album Transition in Tradition is dedicated to Sidney Bechet – a New Orleans jazz pioneer who died half a century ago. His name is probably unknown to music lovers ...

Sam Newsome's The Art of the Soprano, Vol. 1 is a solo soprano saxophone outing, While not unprecedented—Steve Lacy and Evan Parker have done this before—it certainly is unusual. The straight horn all ...

The soprano saxophone, unlike the clarinet or tenor sax, was never popular in jazz until Sidney Bechet, who was the first jazz musician to use it exclusively. A contemporary of Louis Armstrong and ...

Steve Lacy, a leading soprano saxophonist in the modern era of jazz and one of the few jazz musicians awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius grant,” has died. He was 69. Lacy died ...

Many of today’s symphony orchestra instruments have been around for centuries. The violin, for instance, dates to the 1500s and as a result has an enormous repertoire spanning 450 years. The saxophone ...