This award was presented to Benny Carter from Esquire magazine in 1946. It features a stylized gold-tone statue of a man playing a trumpet, Esquire magazine’s pop-eyed mascot “Esky,” on a brown-stained wooden base with an embossed and engraved metal plate. The metal plate is marked:

Esquire's
ALL AMERICAN BAND
ALTO SAXOPHONE - GOLD AWARD
AWARDED TO
BENNY CARTER
1946

Esquire is an American men’s magazine founded in 1933. The magazine featured its first jazz awards, All-American Jazz All Stars and All-American Jazz Band, chosen by Esquire’s board of leading jazz artists, critics, and writers, in 1944. The inaugural winners included Billie Holiday, Roy Eldridge, Jack Teagarden, Barney Bigard, Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum, Al Casey, Oscar Pettiford, and Sidney Catlett.

The “Esky” mascot was created by African American cartoonist E. Simms Campbell (1906-1971).

Benny Carter, born in New York City in 1907, was an American jazz alto saxophonist, clarinetist, trumpeter, composer, arranger, and bandleader who made a significant contribution to jazz throughout his seventy year career. He has received two Grammy Awards, and in 1986 was granted the NEA Jazz Masters award by The National Endowment for the Arts. Carter died in 2003 at the age of 95.