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Five Titans Of Texas Tenor Sax

<p>Illinois Jacquet.</p>
William Gottlieb
/
Library of Congress via Flickr

Illinois Jacquet.

When jazz fans talk about the Texas Tenor saxophone sound, they're talking about a sound which is very robust, sometimes raw, and which mixes the musical vocabularies of swing, bebop, blues and R&B. It's that honking, bar-walking saxophone sound that used to blast from jukeboxes coast-to-coast. Here are five examples of that sound from saxophonists who hail (and wail) from Texas.

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Nick Morrison