Reviewed by Nicole Laskowski

Saxophone: it is an instrument that has been played for over 150 years. And from its birth, it has carried a reputation for being a rebel.

In the book The Devil’s Horn: the Story of the Saxophone from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool, Michael Segell provides a biography of the saxophone beginning with its Belgium inventor Adolphe Sax, a man who faced death and who was spared several times. In 1843, Sax introduced his prototype only to find himself surrounded by jealousy, smear campaigns and lawsuits.

Segell then follows the instrument across the globe into North and Central America and into Asia. In every country, the saxophone’s voice has been banned, jailed, ostracized, ignored, and stereotyped as being too lascivious by everybody from the Nazi party to the Japanese government to the Catholic church, chamber orchestras and Hollywood.

But it is a voice that has refused to be silenced. Segell introduces a long list of characters who are seduced by it, who become devoted to an instrument capable of allowing what’s deep inside to emerge: breaths blown through a conical tube are transformed into the sounds of the soul. From John Coltrane who played every day. To Sonny Rollins who described playing like falling into a trance. To Vernard Johnson whose playing makes inmates faint when they place their faces in front of the bell of the horn. To the author himself who as a novice player includes passages of his own desire to master the instrument.

And through the instrument’s story, Segell reveals the important role the saxophone has played in the evolution of R&B, jazz, bebop, and he ventures to show how music can impact the whole world.

Segell’s description of saxophone music is sonorous. And, although the saxophone is the subject of the book, it is not the central character. Instead what lies at the heart of Segell’s book is the relationship between a player and an instrument: the desire to find the perfect moment when they are simultaneously alive. 

To read Segell’s book is to truly hear the saxophone for the first time.