If you want to understand what people mean by "Texas tenor," start with Arnett Cobb. Big tone, no apologies, a sound built for dancing and shouting back at the bandstand. He grew up in Houston around musicians like Illinois Jacquet and Buddy Tate, and that city's particular brand of blues-drenched, honking saxophone runs through everything he played.

Cobb got his break with Lionel Hampton's band in the early 1940s, stepping into the solo on "Flying Home" that Jacquet had already turned into a legend. That's a tough spot to walk into — following a signature solo everyone already knows by heart — but Cobb made it his own, leaning even harder into the raw, screaming upper register that made Hampton's band such a crowd-pleaser. People started calling him the "Wild Man of the Tenor Sax," and the name stuck because he earned it live, night after night.

He led his own group, Arnett Cobb and his Mob, through the late '40s and into the '50s, cutting sides that split the difference between swing-era big-band energy and the earthier, more danceable sound that would soon get called rhythm and blues. Then came the setbacks — a car accident in 1956 that put him on crutches, later a diagnosis that landed him in a wheelchair for stretches of his life. Most players would have packed it in. Cobb kept gigging, kept recording into the 1980s, and by all accounts his tone never lost its size or its bite.

What I'd tell a friend before pressing play: don't expect subtlety. Cobb isn't working the quiet corners of the horn the way a cooler-toned player might. He's playing for people who want to feel something in their chest, blues phrasing stretched out over a big, warm, sometimes downright rowdy sound. He's not the guy who rewrote the rules of jazz saxophone. He's the guy who took one very specific, very physical approach to the tenor and refused to let it fade out, even when his own body gave him every reason to quit.