What If The Saxaphone Wasn't Invented

This question is mainly inspired by this post:

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/attachment.php?attachmentid=269450&stc=1&d=1453617088

Adolph Sax suffered many near-death experiences that could've prevented the invention of the sacaphone, so what if he did die before he invented it? What changes would that have on history?

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I wouldn't get annoyed by people wrongly calling saxophones brass instruments.

For a slightly more serious analysis, the saxophone may not be the only instrument he invented. There's a disputed claim as to whether his saxhorn is the progenitor of the tenor horn (alto horn in the US and Japan), and possibly the baritone too. If that's the case, then brass bands have between three and five parts missing from the middle of the score.
 
I'd say Jazz might not exist if the saxaphone hasn't gotten invented- or if it did, it would be very different.
 
I don't think any instrument called a "saxaphone" or "sacaphone" has ever been invented. Now, if the saxophone hadn't been invented, well...
 
I'd say Jazz might not exist if the saxaphone hasn't gotten invented- or if it did, it would be very different.

Actually, New Orleans purists frown on the saxophone, which was not part of the classic New Orleans "front line" which consisted of trumpet (or cornet), trombone, and clarinet. Yes, there was Sidney Bechet's soprano sax, but as Gunther Schuller wrote in *Early Jazz*, "Though technically speaking then a saxophone player, Bechet nevertheless belongs in a discussion of clarinetists because he played the soprano saxophone with a technique and style very much out of the New Orleans clarinet tradition. The reed player traditionally thinks of the soprano saxophone as a cousin to the clarinet..." https://books.google.com/books?id=PfwfMTWBGgYC&pg=PA195 One traditionalist, Rex Harris, actually wrote that Coleman Hawkins would have been a better musician if he had stuck to the clarinet! Which, as someone remarked, "is a bit like saying that Mozart might have been OK if he had stuck to the harpsichord." http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-e...worrying-and-love-the-curly-horn-1090211.html

Most jazz scholars today agree that this the purists are wrong, that saxophones (even apart from Bechet's soprano) did play a role in New Orleans jazz bands--consider the 1927 Sam Morgan recordings. http://www.redhotjazz.com/sammorgen.html

In any event, it is true that is hard to conceive of later jazz styles--swing and especially bop and other "modern" styles--without the saxophone. The clarinet for some reason has never had the prominence in modern jazz that it had in New Orleans and swing.
 
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