He called on the saxophone

In 1841,  Adolphe Sax, an inventor living in Belgium, came up with a great idea: putting maple syrup on a Belgian waffle.

And he also figured out that if he put a reed, from a woodwind instrument, into a brass horn, the resultant device would make music that sounded like a saxophone. Which is why he named it after himself.

Sax and his sax moved to France, where he had all sorts of trouble. The musical instrument business did not like his horn.  Some enemy burned down his factory, someone tried to kill him, and he filed for bankruptcy twice.

At least he had the right instrument to play a mournful wailing solo for his bad luck.

It got worse after he died, even. In Nazi days, German authorities called the sax "entartete kunst" (degenerate art) and sent SS soldiers to clobber anyone caught wailing away on one. 

In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union banned the use of saxes in bands, on the grounds that the instrument was the embodiment of Jazz, which was "the embodiment of bourgeois American imperialist culture." 

And you'll notice that no action was ever taken against the inventor of the recorder, which has been used by schoolchildren to torture their parents with agonizing renditions of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" since Stalin was in junior high.

And now comes news from Italy, where doctors performed delicate brain surgery while the patient stayed awake...while playing his saxophone.

Officials at Paideia International Hospital in Rome reported that 35-year-old patient "G.Z." stayed awake and played a medley of saxophone favorites that lasted all through the 9-hour tumorectomy.

Besides allowing the operating room staff to turn off whatever background music they usually play, G.Z's music let the surgeons "map" different brain functions as they worked.

"Awake surgery makes it possible to map with extreme precision during surgery the neuronal networks that underlie the various brain functions such as playing, speaking, moving, remembering, counting," said lead surgeon Dr. Christian Brogna.

Dr. Brogna said the surgery was a success, even though most hospitals recommend that doctors refrain from having sax while on duty.