Sexophone

"O listen to him and his saxophone

Our musical genital unicorn

He's very well hung with his golden horn"

— Leonard Cohen, "Song of Destruction"

A short riff on the saxophone used to indicate the arrival or presence of a sexy woman (or occasionally man). It can be as subtle as how loudly the music is played.

The muted trumpet can be used to similar effect.

The history of this trope comes from the fact that jazz and R&B were played in brothels and burlesque houses. The musicians were supposed to play music to, ahem, enhance the experience. Many jazz musicians' nicknames were often euphemisms, like Jelly Roll Morton, which reflected their roots as brothel musicians.

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A Sister Trope to Bow Chicka Wow Wow.

Compare other Mood Motifs.

May overlap with Creepy Jazz Music when Evil Is Sexy.

Not to Be Confused with the device in Brave New World^note although that could be an example of it; it's never described in enough detail as to whether it's just a relabelled saxophone or an entirely different electronic or futuristic instrument, nor a character having sex with a saxophone, nor Sexy Sax Man, nor a sex hotline.

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Examples:

Advertising

• An ad for Zoosk features a woman fantasizing about a sexy scene with a guy, accompanied by a sultry saxophone riff. And the riff promptly cuts off as soon as they smack their skulls into each other during an attempted kiss, and again when he bumps her head into a bedpost.
• Long Long Man, a series of ads for a Japanese brand of gummy candies, chronicles the love story of a woman who's having doubts about her boyfriend's choice of the shorter variety of the gummy when she sees another man preferring the longer variety, with "Long, Long Maaaaaannnn~" being sung in the background. Cue sax riff.

Anime & Manga

• Used whenever Mune Mune first appears in any given world in Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. Well, whenever it's not just a single timpani beat.
• Naruto:
  • Naruto with this whenever he does the Sexy Jutsu, where he transforms into an attractive scantily-clad woman to induce nosebleeds in men.
  • It's also played every time something overly melodramatic happens, and for some reason every time a joke's punchline involves a ridiculously oversized animal.
• Ouka's theme song from .hack//Legend of the Twilight is a song called "You Want To Have Me As Your Pet, Don't You..."
• One of the background tracks from Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, "S-Trip" just screams Sexy time, with it being involved in fanservice, pole dancing, and food sex.
• The saxophone is Rouge's leitmotif in both the Japanese version and the 4Kids dub of Sonic X.
• Kimagure Orange Road's Madoka Ayukawa plays one mean sax. She is, of course, the more mature leg of the Love Triangle. "Madoka no Teema"
• Used also as the leitmotif for Akeno in High School Dx D.
• A Certain Scientific Railgun: Kuroko attempts to trick Mikoto into drinking out of a thermos laced with aphrodisiacs, but ends up dosing herself instead. Ten seconds later, the sax is playing on the soundtrack as she desperately tries to convince Mikoto to change into her swimsuit while they clean the pool.
• Played when Esmeraude first appears in Sailor Moon
• In the Ah! My Goddess OAV series, Urd's first appearance is accompanied by a song titled "Sexy Dynamite".
• One Piece:
  • Features heavily in Nico Robin's theme.
  • This type of music also plays in the background when Kalifa seduces Sanji.
• Irresponsible Captain Tylor plays this at Harumi's introduction.
• In Date A Live, nearly all of Kurumi Tokisaki's appearances in the anime are marked with a trumpet variant of this trope, with her trying to seduce Shido on the go.
• This occasionally plays in Yo-Kai Watch. For example, in the scene where B3-NK1 sticks his sword into Robonyan to find a screw.
• Appears with frequency in Dragon Ball whenever Master Roshi gets into sexual antics with Bulma, Launch or any attractive woman he happens to catch the eye of. Also heard with Bulma and Yamcha's early relationship, which is Played for Laughs considering Yamcha's considerable fear of women at the time.
• One plays as Kenichi watches Tima basking in the sunlight with a dove perching on her shoulder in Metropolis. You can practically smell the puberty.
• In the first episode of The Quintessential Quintuplets, Fuutarou enters Ichika's room for the first time, and tries to pull her out of bed so they can start studying. It begins playing when she reveals that she's not wearing clothes and has to ask Yotsuba to find her some in the mess.

Films — Animation

• Jessica Rabbit's theme in Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a sultry sax riff.
• Lola Bunny's debut in Space Jam was with a sultry Jazz beat.
• In Disney's Tangled, a brief sax riff accompanies Gentleman Thief Flynn Rider's seductive face, the Smolder (tm). Rapunzel remains unmoved.
• Plays when Milo first meets Helga Sinclair in Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
• Hercules:
  • A sexophone riff shows up when Megera says to Hercules, flirtatiously: "I'm a big tough girl. I tie my own sandals and everything."
  • And before that: "I'm a damsel... (GRUNT!) I'm in distress. I can handle this. Have a nice day." (sexophone)
• This is used in Felidae during the infamous sex scene.
• Happened when Sasha Lafleur was first introduced in All Dogs Go to Heaven 2.

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Films — Live-Action

• A saxophone solo was included in the Theme Tune from The Invisible Woman (1983). It may also have been Alexa Hamilton's musical signature in the movie.
• The muted trumpet variety opens the song "All That Jazz" as the camera reveals the curvaceous Catherine Zeta-Douglas in Chicago.
• The love theme from Blade Runner, composed by Vangelis and featuring a sax performance by Dick Morrissey.
• Used in Goldfinger when Pussy Galore's Flying Circus leave their planes.
  • Also heard in Diamonds Are Forever when James Bond arrives in Las Vegas.
  • In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, there's such a recurring theme for the girls of Piz Gloria.
  • In The Living Daylights, Bond hitches a ride with some attractive CIA agents who took him to Felix Leiter after pretending to kidnap him. Cue the sexy sax.
  • "All Time High", the theme to Octopussy, begins with a sexy riff.
• Spoofed in The Naked Gun 33 1/3, as the camera pans up the Femme Fatale's ankles... to her knees... to her ankles...
• When Laura Kensington (a first-class Femme Fatale) shows up in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, the music shows right up with her.
• Played for Laughs in Tango & Cash when Cash dresses in drag to escape from a nightclub.
• The muted trumpet version is used for Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. This is further expanded on when Monroe reveals to one of the main characters (Who is a Saxophone player himself) that she has a "thing" for Sax players, detailing her romantic exploits with other Sax players.
• The main theme from Planet Terror, which plays over Cherry's go-go dance routine, and later given the action treatment in "Cherry's Dance of Death" when she has her big ass-kicking scene later in the movie.
• Dmitri Shostakovich's Second Waltz, which Stanley Kubrick used as the opening theme in Eyes Wide Shut.
• A Running Gag in The Movie of Our Miss Brooks is a sexophone riff that plays every time Miss Lonelyhearts gets up from her desk and walks through the newspaper office.
• Played with, along with Feet-First Introduction, with a trombone in Airplane!. Turns out the owner of the sexy legs is playing it (making this an example of Left the Background Music On).
• A Running Gag in Fatal Instinct; the Femme Fatale is always accompanied by a steamy sax tune because a professional sax player follows her around, providing her with a theme tune while hiding in hallways, closets, even in her bed. And he's replaced by a trumpet player in one scene because he had to call in sick.
• Sargeant Calahan's scenes were often accompanied by this in the Police Academy series.
• Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Our introduction to Aunty Entity (played by Tina Turner) is a Blind Musician playing the saxophone for her.
• Lord of Illusions: "Harry's Theme", which includes a saxophone performance, is prominently featured during Harry d'Amour's love scene with Dorothea.
• Highway Superstar's "Careful Shouting" from Kung Fury appears to be an Answer Song to George Michael's "Careless Whisper".
• Scooby-Doo 2 - Monsters Unleashed: A saxophone background theme started playing when Shaggy's body turned into a female body right after he licked a drop of a potion on his hand.
• Deadpool gets back with Vanessa at the end of the movie? Cue "Careless Whisper".
• Plays often in Batman & Robin whenever Poison Ivy uses her love dust on someone.
• Malèna: Malena makes her entrance with her new hair-do down the street to a sax riff.
• The Brain That Wouldn't Die has the incredibly sleazy "The Web" playing every time the Mad Doctor goes trolling for new bodies for his fiance.

Literature

• In the novel Brave New World, the hedonistic dystopia actually renamed the musical instrument the sexophone. (That is if it really is the same instrument and not something...different.)
• Played with in Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul:
  "There emerged from the car a pair of the sort of legs which soundtrack editors are unable to see without needing to slap a smoky saxophone solo all over, for reasons which no one besides soundtrack editors has ever been able to understand. In this particular case, however, the saxophone would have been silenced by the proximity of the kazoo which the same soundtrack editor would almost certainly have slapped all over the progress of the vehicle."

Live-Action TV

• In the miniseries adaptation of James Clavell's Noble House, one of these was used at the beginning of nearly every scene where Venus Poon showed up.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 has made a few jokes about this.
  • In The Brain That Wouldn't Die, this type of music plays (as the Villain Protagonist trolls for potential victims) and Tom Servo quips, "It's a sleazy morning out there. You're listening to KPORN, Holmes and Reems in the Morning, playing sleazy, slutty music all morning long. Here's one by Skinny and the Sweat Beads..."
    • Mike brings the riff back later when the music makes its reappearance. "Stay tuned for the obscene phone call of the day, on KPORN."
  • In The Horrors of Spider Island, there's a muted trumpet playing as a bikini-clad model takes a shower. Crow quips, "Those musicians who play muted trumpet solos must love these movies."
    • And "I wasn't even being sexy until the dirty sax music started!"
  • Tom Servo was prone to doing the mute-trumpet riff on occasion, to add sexual subtext to the scene where it really didn't belong. His voice actor, Kevin Murphy, continues the tradition in various RiffTrax.
• Used a lot in Scrubs, along with copious amounts of Gaussian Girl and Hot Wind whenever an attractive female character is first introduced.
• Star Trek: The Original Series. In "Tomorrow is Yesterday", an air force officer from the 20th Century is beamed on board Enterprise, and the first bizarre thing he witnesses is one of the miniskirted Bridge Bunnies striding down a corridor, accompanied by a few bars of muted trumpet.
  Christopher: (dumbfounded) A woman?
  Kirk: Crewman.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation in "The Royale". Lampshaded by SF Debris in his review of the episode:
  "But before they can get underway, we get a bellboy and an offscreen saxophone player."
• Also happens in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy", where the Doctor programs himself to randomly daydream. Given that the Doctor's programming would make him Genre Savvy as hell about this kind of information, it's perfectly logical that an extremely exaggerated version of this trope plays when he slips into a daydream about Seven of Nine, B'Elanna, and Janeway all shamelessly flirting with him. It's hilarious.
• The theme tune to Square One TV (not the remixed version, which replaced it with a synthesizer).
• When discussing Rep. Weiner's tweets on The Daily Show, a shirtless cameraman shows up in the background playing the sax riff from George Michael‎'s song "Careless Whisper".
• Used once in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Buffy, under the influence of a love spell, enters the library wearing a raincoat, heels, a smile, and nothing else. Interestingly, the sax riff telegraphs her intent (to seduce Xander) every bit as much as her arrival.
• Boy Meets World uses this once when Topanga enters the room in a sexy nightgown to show that she is finally ready to have sex with Cory, in one of her very few fanservice-y moments in the show.
• The Munsters used this at least once, when Grampa's latest invention turned Herman into a woman.
• In Flower Boy Ramyun Shop a sexy saxophone tune plays when Eun Bi pulls Chi Soo in for a kiss, as she was playing his own game (of seducing people because he can and then dropping them) against him.
• On The Joe Schmo Show, a musical theme that began with this was used regularly when showing scenes of something that was sexy or wasn't actually, but they wanted to play it as it was for comedy.
• Used in the song "History is Made at Night" from the Show Within a Show from Smash, Bombshell.
• Olive Snook's theme music in Pushing Daisies.

Music

• Billy Joel's "Christie Lee" crosses over with this in an interesting way, as Joe the saxophonist finds out to his misfortune.
• George Michael's "Careless Whisper" IS the sexophone Standard Snippet. Arguably a case of Lyrical Dissonance, as the song is really about the terrible guilt and shame the narrator feels from cheating on a lover.
• Jason Derulo's "Talk Dirty", though the girls in the video are clearly playing trumpets.
• Fifth Harmony's "Worth It", which, as many have pointed out when it first came out, sounds quite a bit like "Talk Dirty".
• Etta James' song "I Just Want To Make Love To You" features a prominent saxophone throughout. Many might recognise the song from the Female Gaze Diet Coke commercials.

Professional Wrestling

• This is one of Aksana's theme songs.
• In a rare male version, this was the theme music for "wrestling porn star" Val Venis.
  • Before that, that was the theme music for The Model Rick Martel. Venis's theme is actually Martel's theme sped up

Sports

• In contrast to the high-energy "walk-up music" used by most baseball players, starting in May 2014, Oakland Athletics outfielder Josh Reddick opted for "Careless Whisper" by George Michael. The fans seem to approve.

Theater

• Miss Saigon features a wailing saxophone song just prior to the leads having sex. They actually refer to it during the song, singing "a song, played on a solo saxophone..."
• All over the place in City of Angels, especially the intro to "Lost and Found."
• Funny Girl: It's part of a nightclub act rather than something more risque, but the fairly stripperiffic song "Cornet Man" is unsurprisingly about a man who plays the cornet (basically a mellower-sounding version of the trumpet). Also, some of the lyrics can be taken as double-entendres suggesting the Cornet Man has reasons other than simply a "gig" to "leave his wife and kiddies" and go on the road, though it's not clear whether these were intentional or the song has fallen victim to Have a Gay Old Time syndrome.

Video Games

• Spoofed in Mother 3, as it is the leitmotif of the not-quite-so-sexy Magypsies. The saxophone there had a weird, reverberated, distorted kind of sound to it. Later on in the game, it even serves as a Musical Spoiler as to the true identity of Fassad as Locria, the seventh Magypsy. And then there's Flint's attack instrument...
• Persona 4 has the track Muscle Blues, which is essentially the theme song for a character's fairly gay Shadow.
  • Hiimdaisy's comic, along with the fandub, manages to make the above so much funnier. "I'm Kanji Tatsumi, and I enjoy naked men! Oh yeah~"
  • Ayase/Alana in Persona. "Ow, my chest hurts!"
  • Lisa/Ginko in Persona 2 also has the Tempt/Seduce like Ayase above, with the sexophone to match. She can also drag Maya and an unwilling/embarrassed Yukino to do a triple seduce... with the sexophone to match.
• A long saxophone solo is played when Fortune first appears in Metal Gear Solid 2. Granted, she's not particularly fanservice-happy, but she's one of only three female characters in the game.
• Makes up EVA's theme tune in Metal Gear Solid 3, almost as a parody.
• Bully plays a sexophone riff whenever the hero finishes a mission that ends with getting a kiss from one of the girls.
• Krystal, at least in Star Fox Adventures, when Fox sees her.
• In Spore, a cheesy sax riff plays when the player mates in Creature Stage. If this sounds steamy to you, you'll be disappointed to find that the mating dance consists of the two creatures waving their butts at each other.
• In the arcade game Silent Scope, a short riff plays when you find a woman in the background and point your sniper rifle at her. It helps that the character you're playing as gasps "Wow!" at the same time. (You get a bonus life point for this.)
• Here's this gem from the ESRB's description of Trauma Team: Female patients are asked to explain their symptoms, then lift up their shirts for closer inspection. The scene contains no nudity, but a saxophone can be heard playing in the background as a male doctor makes the following remarks: "Can she really be that thin?," "dayum!," and — after doctor's heart rate increases — "It's only natural... I'm a straight male."
• Guilty Gear: Slayer has 2 themes, Haven't You Got Eyes In Your Head? from XX and Jack-a-Dandy from Xrd, feature a pretty wicked one.
• Martine's theme in The 7th Guest, reprised when Carl encounters her ghost in The 11th Hour.
• Candy's theme in Donkey Kong 64 uses the muted trumpet variation.
• Chulip: A sax riff plays whenever a successful kiss is made.
• In Deadly Premonition a very sultry (but hectic) jazz piece with heavy sax plays as the leitmotif for the Laura Palmer character. It's also used in the scene where Emily takes off her shirt to show that she doesn't have the Raincoat Killer's tattoo on her back, which betrays that scene's real purpose.
• The Consort in Mass Effect is introduced with a saxophone solo, while the camera follows her lower backside up a staircase.
• Pokémon X and Y:
  • This plays when using the move Attract.
  • The moves Disarming Voice and Captivate also involve sax riffs.
• In Saints Row IV, the romance cut scenes end with this playing.
• Iori Yagami has his themes which play usually jazz-themed with a sweet saxophone solo. Many of these tunes have the words "Arashi no Saxophone" ("Stormy Saxophone") in the title.
• In Fantasia: Music Evolved, before or during the song "Fire" by Jimi Hendrix, the player can substitute the saxophone from the "Eddie Kramer Orchestral Mix" for Jimi's vocals and the song would sound more instrumental and sexy... in a game for ten-plus-year-olds. And this is coming from a guy whose song origins in "Fire" date back to when Noel Redding invited Jimi to stay at the house of Redding's mother at New Year's Eve and to the events that followed.
• The Plunger Thing from Paper Mario: Color Splash has this music playing while it plunges every enemy on the field.
• Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work has a song called "Saxy Sex".
• In Sly Cooper, this often happens when Carmelita Fox shows up.

Web Original

• Lampshaded by Ben and Kerry of 2funnybastards.com and Hamilton, Ontario's Y108: "What is Kenny G. doing in everyone's bedroom ever?"
• In Code Geass: The Abridged Series, Kallen's shower-phone call has "extremely suggestive jazz music" playing.

• The background music in Spooning With Spoony.
• The sexophone riff in George Michael's "Careless Whisper" shows up whenever Bennett the Sage has his alter ego Suave turn up. It's also used to sex up the mood or parody a Ho Yay riddled scene whenever Sage feels like it's appropriate.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series also features "Careless Whisper"'s sexophone during particularly Ho Yay-filled scenes.
• Cracked's summary of the Terminator movies includes this line:
  Two naked men appear and come after her. Luckily, no saxophones are playing at the time, so it becomes an action movie.
• In EQUESTRIA GIRLS, sexy sax music signals that love is in the air (since the characters' facial expressions can't signal that). First, it's played straight, then it's used for a fight scene that unexpectedly turns into a love scene. Then it's used for a truly bizarre scene where the Moon from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask falls in love with Rarity, but she doesn't reciprocate.

Western Animation

• Showed up as a joke in Star Wars: Clone Wars: A snatch of "stripper music" plays when C-3PO first shows off his new gold plating.
• In Sym-Bionic Titan, (co-created by Clone Wars' showrunner), this also happens when the similarly gold-plated Corus (Ilana's mech form) is cleaned off with water and also sparkles.
• Kim Possible: Shego makes an entrance (at 1:20) as a distraction, with squealing trumpet.
• The same sexy saxophone riff shows up in all of MGM's golden age cartoons whenever an attractive female shows up, like Tom and Jerry and shorts by Tex Avery.
• The same three-note sting is played every time someone on 6teen looks "sexy", whether female or male.
• Both played straight and averted in The Ren & Stimpy Show. The sexophone was used both upon arrivals of attractive women, as well as various scenes involving Stimpy (e.g.a scene of him stripping off his fur before going skinny-dipping).
• Family Guy: In "Family Guy Viewer Mail #1", Peter wishes for his own personal soundtrack from a genie. The music engages in some Mickey Mousing, but when Peter and Lois are about to get intimate it turns into funky Sexophone music.
  • And there's the two of them engaging in "phone sax", which is playing sexy saxophone songs over the phone to each other. Lois does it with her vagina.
    Peter: Don't wash the mouthpiece.
  • In another episode, Peter watches a film with Allison Janney, and a sexy sax is heard as she steps out of a cab and the camera pans upward. However, her legs seems to go on forever, leading to a note that gets held for so long, the sax player has to pause a moment to catch his breath.
• In the Darkwing Duck episode, Beauty and the Beet, this is used for Hot Scientist Rhoda Dendron.
• One would occasionally be played for Rosie O'Gravy from Dog City. Specifically whenever Ace Hart has an internal monologue in which he thinks fondly of her. Given the animated segments of the series parody classic detective stories, this is perhaps not surprising.
• Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs used this a lot, Animaniacs especially (like whenever Minerva Mink and Hello Nurse were around).
• The Bump in the Night episode "Party Poopers" had saxophone music briefly play when Molly Coddle tears off the dress the Cute Dolls gave her to wear at their party.
• This appears several times in a Big Hero 6: The Series episode where Aunt Cass gets a date.
• The Sexophone is played in The Emperor's New School whenever Kuzco sees Malina.

Real Life

• Variation: among the traits of then-President Bill Clinton that get played up in comedy are his saxophone playing and Handsome Lech tendencies.
  • And then there's that one time he was given a saxophone by the mayor of Adolphe Sax's hometown where the mayor (clearly not a native speaker of English) uttered the phrase "instrument of Sax".
• Prince, the musician: "If I want sax, I call Candy." (Candy Dulfer, a Dutch saxophone player who collaborated with Prince. Given that it's Prince, a Double Entendre was intended.)
  • Candy Dulfer herself brought out an album (with the title song of the same name) called Saxuality, playing on the same pun.
• Legendary saxophonist Johnny Hodges, a long-time member of the Duke Ellington orchestra, is particularly known for a lush and sensuous sound on that falls right into this trope. See his rendition of "Star-Crossed Lovers."

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