Brassy, smokey, melodious. There’s nothing like the saxophone. From the award winners behind Before She was Harriet comes an incredible work of nonfiction that includes a gatefold of the saxophone greats.

While you may think that the story of the saxophone begins with Dexter Gordon or Charlie Parker–or on a street corner in New Orleans. It really began in 1840 in Belgium with a young boy named Joseph-Antoine Adolphe Sax–a boy so prone to daydreaming that by the time he was ten years old he had: swallowed a needle, nearly drowned, and been poisoned three times.

Lesa Cline-Ransome unravels the fascinating history of how Adolphe’s once reviled instrument was transported across Europe and Mexico and then to New Orleans by Florencio Ramos, a member of the Mexican Calvary, where, eventually, a saxophone in a pawn shop would catch the eye of musician Sidney Bechet and become the iconic symbol of jazz music that it is today.

Deflty retold, this history is paired with the gorgeous artwork of James E. Ransome, including a four-page gatefold of iconic jazz musicians.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection