[The following is reprinted from Mass Historia: 365 Days of Historical Facts and (Mostly) Fictions. In stores now!]

On this day, the man who invented the instrument you picked up for a few weeks in middle school because you liked the way Bruce Willis scatted with it in that wine cooler commercial, was born.  He was a Belgian named Adolph Sax, and he invented the saxophone.

Sax’s father was an instrument maker, and had 11 children, so it is obvious what the elder Sax’s favorite instrument was.  His oldest, Adolph, began working for his father at an early age, inventing a bass clarinet when he was 20 years old, or two years older than most people are when they stop playing the bass clarinet, vowing to leave their “nerdom” behind forever in high school.

Sax seems to have been a sort of antagonistic, tortured fellow (as opposed to noted Saxman Kenny G, who antagonizes others to the point of torture) and lived a life of poverty in Paris while working on his saxophone, which he eventually patented in 1846.  It combined the single reed of the clarinet with the bore and fingering patterns of the oboe, producing a sound all its own, but with a name that lends itself to sex puns and therefore seems somewhat cooler.  (See sexy saxophonist Candy Dulfer’s 1990 album “Saxuality.”  It’s probably sitting in a 99 cent bin somewhere.)

Also Born On This Date:

November 6th, 1948: Eagle and rocker Glen Frey born, whose 1984 song, “The Heat is On,” is enough to make you hate Adolph Sax and his stupid invention forever.