Pick your favorite, and tell me why...

Charles Lloyd *All my relations* Would be a very nice place to start. This guy lights up a sax and smokes it for sixty minutes or so.

Coleman Hawkins encounters Ben Webster (Verve Master Edition) with Oscar Peterson, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown and Alvin Stoller. You want blues/jazz, this 1957 recorded cd is what it's all about!

An XRCD2 by Jacintha "Autumn Leaves"-- The Music of Johnny Mercer, is the best CD recording I have ever heard, and the music is great too. My new "standard" for female vocals. Cheers. Craig

Tenor saxophone is a pretty broad category. Ben Webster, Illinois Jacquet, Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Zoot Simms, Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Charles Lloyd, John Coltrane, and about a hundred more excellent musicians. Kind of like asking for recommendations of piano players. Where do you start? I would recommend picking up a Jazz guide from a local bookstore and picking up a few of what they recommend. You can then expand your search based on whether you agree or disagree with their tastes.

My personal favorite saxophone player is Art Pepper. Of course, he was a master of the Alto Sax, but I don't think you want to limit yourself to the tenor. He also played a mean clarinet. Let me reiterate, Art Pepper was a musical genius and you should seek out any and all of his recordings.

Thanks for the suggestions so far, and Herman, I am in fact waiting for the book suggested by sdcampbell in the Jazz primer post. Looking forward to exploring it all, but am really a sax fan.