Saxophone Trivia
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50 free Saxophone trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This saxophone trivia quiz covers the brass instrument that is officially a woodwind, from Adolphe Sax's Paris workshop to the bandstands of jazz, rock and The Simpsons. The easy questions are the ones any music fan can answer: who invented it, what it is made of, what makes it sound, and which member of the family Lisa Simpson plays. From there the set moves through the instrument itself: the 1846 patent and its fourteen sizes, why the E-flat and B-flat series won out, the leather pads and octave key, the reed cane, the mouthpiece materials, the low B-flat extension and the high F-sharp key. The harder end is for players and jazz heads: the Belgian town where Sax was born, his lip cancer and death in poverty, the ophicleide and bass clarinet that shaped his design, Coleman Hawkins making the tenor a jazz voice, Charlie Parker's plastic Grafton at Massey Hall, Coltrane's soprano on My Favorite Things, Sonny Rollins practising on the Williamsburg Bridge, the Conn-O-Sax and King Saxello, the tubax and soprillo, the man who played the Baker Street riff, Kenny G's 45-minute Guinness note and the president who played tenor on The Arsenio Hall Show. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the saxophone, its inventor and its most famous players and songs before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Jazz, Musical Instruments and Music History quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Plas Johnson's tenor saxophone plays the slinky Henry Mancini theme of which 1960s film comedy?
The Pink Panther
The Pink Panther. Mancini wrote the tune with Johnson's sound in mind, and when the second take ended the whole studio orchestra applauded, something Johnson said session players never do.
Q 02The saxophone belongs to which family of instruments?
Woodwind
Woodwind. Its body is brass, but its sound comes from a vibrating reed, and that mechanism, not the metal, decides which family an instrument belongs to.
Q 03Which French composer praised Sax's new saxophone in print in 1842?
Berlioz
Hector Berlioz. Sax had just arrived in Paris with almost no money when he showed him the instrument, and the long article of praise that followed in the Journal des Débats gave the unknown maker a famous champion.
Q 04Dinant, which lines its main bridge with painted saxophones in honour of native son Adolphe Sax, is in which country?
Belgium
Belgium. Sax was only a baby when his family left Dinant for Brussels, yet the town still claims him, with a museum at his birthplace and bridge saxophones each painted for a different European country.
Q 05Of the two series of seven saxophones in Sax's patent, which pair of keys became standard?
B-flat and E-flat
B-flat and E-flat. The rival series never caught on, so every member of the modern saxophone family is pitched in one of those two keys and Sax's other seven designs are now rarities.
Q 06Which four saxophones are in widest modern use?
Soprano, alto, tenor, baritone
Soprano, alto, tenor, baritone. Sax patented 14 versions, meant for military bands and orchestras alike, but bands and quartets settled on just these four.
Q 07What closes the tone holes of a saxophone when a key is pressed?
Leather pads
Leather pads. Each is a disc of felt covered in leather, soft enough to seal its tone hole when the key comes down, and the largest on an alto is about five centimetres across.
Q 08What is the lowest written note on most modern saxophones?
Low B-flat
Low B-flat. Sax's first instruments stopped a semitone higher, at B, until makers lengthened the bell and added a key; only the largest common size usually goes lower still, to A.
Q 09What is the saxophone's highest register called, the notes above its normal keyed range?
Altissimo
Altissimo. The word is Italian for 'highest', and because the keywork stops below these notes, players coax them out with special fingerings and fine control of the mouth and air.
Q 10Music for every size of saxophone, from the highest to the lowest, is written in which clef?
Treble
Treble. Every size is written as if it were the same instrument, so a given written note takes the same fingering on all of them and players can switch sizes without relearning.
Q 11Saxophone reeds are traditionally cut from the stalks of which plant?
Giant cane
Giant cane. Its hollow stalks reach full height in a single year, then are split lengthwise and shaved thin, and because the material is natural no two reeds play exactly alike.
Q 12A saxophone jumps an octave when overblown, but a clarinet rises by which interval?
A twelfth
A twelfth. A clarinet's near-cylindrical bore makes it leap an octave plus a fifth, so its registers need different fingerings; Sax chose a cone-shaped tube so that his would repeat.
Q 13Before inventing the saxophone, the young Adolphe Sax made his name with a new design of which instrument?
Bass clarinet
Q 21Which maker's Balanced Action saxophones of 1936 revolutionised the left-hand key mechanics?
Selmer
Selmer. Seven years earlier the Paris firm had taken over Adolphe Sax's own company, and the key layout it went on to refine was copied until nearly every saxophone used it.
Q 22Coleman Hawkins made the tenor a jazz solo instrument during his 1923-34 stint with which bandleader?
Fletcher Henderson
Fletcher Henderson. Hawkins spent 11 years in his New York big band, and when Louis Armstrong joined it in 1924 the trumpeter's phrasing pushed Hawkins to streamline his own playing.
Q 23Alto saxophonist Charlie Parker became the icon of which jazz revolution in the 1940s?
Bebop
Bass clarinet. His version so impressed the conductor of the Paris Opera that he called the older ones barbarous, and the saxophone grew out of Sax's efforts to better its tone.
Q 14Which family of valved brass instruments, made by Adolphe Sax in the 1840s, paved the way for the euphonium?
Saxhorn
Saxhorn. Sax did not invent the valved bugle it grew from, but his matched family outsold his rivals' so thoroughly that it took his name, and its bass member became the model for the euphonium.
Q 15Which illness did saxophone inventor Adolphe Sax survive in the 1850s?
Lip cancer
Lip cancer. It was usually a death sentence at the time, yet a herbalist doctor's treatment cleared it, and Sax went on making instruments for decades afterwards.
Q 16Which misfortune befell saxophone inventor Adolphe Sax three times, in 1852, 1873 and 1877?
Bankruptcy
Bankruptcy. His workshop sold some 20,000 instruments between 1843 and 1860, yet rival makers fought his patents in court for years and the sales never kept him solvent.
Q 17Tenor saxophonist Stan Getz set off an American craze for which Brazilian style in the early 1960s?
Bossa nova
Bossa nova. His 1962 album with guitarist Charlie Byrd made a hit of Desafinado and The Girl from Ipanema followed in 1964, yet Getz rarely went back to the style after those years.
Q 18John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley were the two saxophonists on which 1959 Miles Davis album?
Kind of Blue
Kind of Blue. Davis handed his sextet scales to improvise on instead of the usual chord changes, and Coltrane carried that modal approach into his own bands of the 1960s.
Q 19Which saxophone was sold to amateurs in the early 20th century because it could play straight from piano sheet music?
C melody
C melody. Pitched in C, it let a home player read the same notes as the pianist with no transposing, and makers sold it as a parlour instrument until the Great Depression ended production.
Q 20Which 1928 orchestral piece by Maurice Ravel gives solos to both the tenor and the soprano saxophone?
Boléro
Boléro. Saxophones were unusual guests in an orchestra, but Ravel liked jazz, and the piece he wrote for dancer Ida Rubinstein passes one tune from solo to solo as it grows ever louder.
Bebop. Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie worked the style out together in the mid-1940s, turning jazz from music for dancing into fast, intricate music for listening.
Q 24Which saxophone did Charlie Parker play at the 1953 Massey Hall concert in Toronto?
A plastic Grafton
A plastic Grafton. Parker had pawned his own horn, so he was handed the budget acrylic alto for the night; in 1994 it sold at Christie's in London for about $144,000 and went on display in a jazz museum.
Q 25Where was Charlie Parker born in 1920?
Kansas City
Kansas City. Born on the Kansas side, he grew up across the state line in Missouri, where his mother bought him a saxophone and he was playing the city's nightclubs by his mid-teens.
Q 26Which John Coltrane album, recorded in December 1964, did he offer as praise to God?
A Love Supreme
A Love Supreme. Coltrane's liner notes trace it to a spiritual awakening he had in 1957, and the suite became one of his best-selling records.
Q 27Coltrane's 1961 album My Favorite Things was his first on which instrument?
Soprano saxophone
Soprano saxophone. Jazz players had largely ignored the instrument, but Coltrane's waltz-time version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune became a radio hit and set off a revival.
Q 28Which saxophonist quit performing in 1959 and spent two years practising on New York's Williamsburg Bridge?
Sonny Rollins
Sonny Rollins. His Lower East Side flat was too cramped to practise in, so he played on the bridge's walkway beside the subway trains, then named his 1962 comeback album The Bridge.
Q 29Tenor saxophone pioneer Coleman Hawkins was known as Hawk and by which other nickname?
Bean
Bean. Nobody is sure where the name came from, but fellow musicians used it for the man whose 1939 recording of Body and Soul became one of the most imitated solos in jazz.
Q 30Harry Carney played saxophone for 47 years in which bandleader's orchestra?
Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington. Carney joined as a 17-year-old in 1927 and was still there when Ellington died in 1974, and the band's sound was built upward from his deep, full tone.