In its relatively short life, one golden object has courted an incredible amount of controversy.

It has offended ideologues, drawn the ire of dictators, and been outlawed around the world — but it's only grown in strength.

That object is the saxophone, at turns revered and reviled in its lifetime.

And just as two kinds of instruments were combined to create it, there are two sides to its history.

One side is beautiful. The other is brutal.

The saxophone has been both revered and reviled in its 180-year history. ( Getty: Jinnaritt Thongruay/EyeEm )

The controversial new kid on the block

One of the world's most highly regarded saxophonists, 89-year-old jazz legend Sonny Rollins, says the saxophone has always divided people.

"It confounds a lot of people and they've been trying to disgrace it and put it down," Rollins says.

Some have described it as a "demonic instrument" — a label Rollins rejects.

"People trying to put it down is a disgrace," he says.

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The saxophone was born in 1841, when young Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax had the radical idea of putting the reed of a woodwind instrument on a brass body.

Sax's hybrid invention had the impressive boom of a trumpet, but the emotional subtlety of a flute.

Military bands loved it — but an established industry of instrument-makers most certainly did not.

When Sax moved to France in 1842, the new kid on the block threatened to take their business.

Sax's furious competitors set about destroying him, stealing his designs, setting fire to his factory and even trying to kill him.

Sax unsuccessfully battled these rivals all his life. He was bankrupted twice and saw out his final days destitute.

"It was pretty vicious business dealings," says Richard Ingham, editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Saxophone.

"It was really evil stuff."

Jealous rivals tried to murder the saxophone's bright young inventor, Adolphe Sax. ( Getty: Zander & Labisch/ullstein bild )

The saxophone as 'degenerate'

When the saxophone was picked up by dance bands of the early 1900s, the instrument became a star. More sold in the mid-to-late-1920s than electric guitars in the 1960s.

But popularity brought with it serious — and seriously powerful — detractors.

By 1933, when the Nazis took power in Germany, the saxophone had become a symbol of jazz music and inextricably intertwined with African-American culture.

The instrument fell under what Nazis referred to as "Entartete Kunst", or "degenerate art", which saw many artforms banned.

One 1938 poster advertising a "degenerate music" exhibition featured a black, monkey-like caricature, wearing a Star of David badge and playing the saxophone.

"The white supremacist concept of the Nazis and the desire to have a pure Aryan culture meant that they didn't want anything to do with jazz because of its African-American history and connotations," Ingham says.

"It's pretty revolting."

It became difficult, and dangerous, to play the saxophone in Germany, with reports of SS soldiers knocking saxophones out of players' mouths.

The instrument has also been banned in churches — starting with the Vatican in 1914 — perhaps for its association with some of the more sexually suggestive dance moves of the early 1900s.

"Ecclesiastical authorities insisted that the saxophone movement be omitted rather than let the instrument's profane voice speak within the sacred building," Ingham says.

Trouble didn't end there. In the 1930s, Stalin's Soviet Union also persecuted the saxophone.

"The saxophone was the embodiment of jazz, which in turn was the embodiment of bourgeois American imperialist culture, so that would be a good enough reason to ban the saxophone," Ingham says.

Orchestras in the Soviet Union were forced to pull their saxophones, saxophonists had to hand over their instruments, and players were arrested, imprisoned and even exiled.

A voice for black Americans

The saxophone symbolised racism in Germany and fear of imperialism in Russia, but in the US, when jazz music arrived, it became a voice for black American liberation.

"Jazz is really a black artform," Rollins says.

The saxophone is so central to jazz, he says the instrument "almost represents" it.

"If I played jazz, then I was automatically connected with my black roots," he says.

Sonny Rollins' music connects him to his black roots. ( Getty: Frans Schellekens/Redferns )

Rollins was born in the US in 1930 to family who were slaves on the US-owned Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, before being taken to North America.

He was politicised from an early age, influenced by his activist grandmother, with whom he marched for black civil rights.

"There was a lot of lynchings and … a lot of black people in the south were accused of raping white women and they weren't; they were innocent," Rollins says.

"Just like many things in the United States, if there was somebody great that did it that was black, he was shunted aside and made to disappear."

But through jazz music, which originated in New Orleans in the teens of the 1900s, many black musicians discovered a loud voice.

Between 1913 and 1916 the first all-black jazz bands were featuring the saxophone. The music was powerful and unstoppable.

Rollins, a few decades later, put its power to good use.

WEB Du Bois inspired Sonny Rollins to create music to empower black people. ( Carl Van Vechten, © Van Vechten Trust. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University )

"I remember that WEB Du Bois, who was a famous black leader here, said that any artist who has gotten famous in the United States had a responsibility to speak about the injustices that black people endured in this country, and they should do that through their art," he says.

"So as soon as I got a chance to, [when] I got a little popular ... I composed the Freedom Suite. I said something about it."

In the original liner notes to his seminal jazz album of 1958, he writes: "How ironic that the Negro, who more than any other people can claim America's culture as its own, is being persecuted and repressed."

'The Lisa Simpson effect'

Women, too, have broken new ground on the saxophone.

English saxophonist and composer Charlotte Harding says when the saxophone burst onto the musical scene, its radical newness meant "everyone could make it what they wanted to make it".

"I think that's what's so special about the saxophone, is that it has this kind of newness," she says.

"Even now we still think of it as a relatively new instrument. So many people then have that mindset of, well, everything's possible with it."

In 1876, just three decades after the saxophone was invented, touring US saxophonist Etta Morgan, billed as "the only lady saxophone player in the world", was succeeding in a male-dominated music industry.

Etta Morgan broke new ground on the saxophone. ( Private collection, Museum Kempenland Eindhoven )

It's reported the first concert saxophone solo by an African-American was performed by a woman, Elsie Hoffman, in 1889, and one of the instrument's first recordings was made by Bessie Mecklem, playing her version of Ave Maria, in 1892.

"I remember seeing that date for the first time and just thinking, 'Oh my goodness.' It's so early on when you think about it," Harding says.

More than a century later, women and the saxophone are still strongly connected.

Diana Tolmie, from the Queensland Conservatorium, says when she started teaching saxophone 30 years ago, "you'd be really hard pressed trying to get girls to play".

"It was very much a boy's instrument. Girls just wouldn't touch it," she says.

Then, in 1989, TV show The Simpsons changed everything.

"I call it 'the Lisa Simpson effect'," Dr Tolmie says.

She says Lisa was a "cool character [who] played the baritone", becoming a role model for other girls.

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"What we noticed at the Conservatorium was that, where it used to be a 90 per cent male, 10 per cent female ratio, it completely flipped the other way," Dr Tolmie says.

"We just had this influx of females coming in and auditioning."

Dr Tolmie says that popularity has held and, while other instruments ebb and flow, the number of saxophone students in Australia remains consistently strong.

"It's a very accessible instrument to start off with, so that I think aids a lot in avoiding any kind of attrition of numbers," she says.

But Rollins has a different explanation for the continued popularity of his instrument.

"As long as people hear the saxophone they will be seduced by it ... To me it is a beautiful sound, which is certainly existing in the heavens," he says.