The tenor saxophone was first established as a jazz instrument through the pioneering playing of Coleman Hawkins in the 1930’s. This lifted the tenor from its more mundane role in ensemble music to being a highly-effective melody instrument in its own right.

The tenor saxophone then became the standard jazz instrument in the early 1940’s through the inspirational playing of Lester Young who produced the light and jaunty scalic approach to improvisation. Opposed to the more interval and arpeggioic approach of Hawkins. The late 1940’s saw the rise of the still popular be-bop music, a name which was not chosen or liked by its co-founders Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. The prominent tenor players of this era were the Four Brothers in the Woody Herman orchestra including Stan Getz and Zoot Sims.

The second generation of be-bop players included such tenor greats as Hank Mobley, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon and Benny Golsen.

As a result of the Jazz Saxophones prominence in jazz, the instrument has also featured prominently in other genres. The tenor is extremely common in rhythm and blues music and has a part to play in rock and roll and more recent rock music as well as Afro-American, Latin American, Afro-Caribbean, and African music. It has also been used on occasion by many post-punk and experimental bands throughout the UK and Europe in the 1980s, sometimes atonally.