My Musical Biography, Part 4

A few months before college graduation I acquired a Mark 6 alto for $500 from a Berklee student who quit alto to concentrate on tenor – I didn’t get his name and wonder what famous player he is now? I still have it. My $150 Bundy went to Don Baker. I also acquired two horns from old guys in Terre Haute, the original owners who were big band players in their prime years – an all-original Buescher tenor which I still have right here next to me, and a perfect Selmer padless alto which had a reed in its case marked June 1, 1944. The Selmer owner was on his way out and said he held on to it as long as he could but wanted someone to play it who could appreciate it, so he was happy to sell it to me. That horn was stolen during one of our many wretched moves, which really hit me hard. I played the Buescher for the first time at the American Legion on Wabash Avenue in Terre Haute with Donn Armstrong’s band, Born Too Loose and Land of a Thousand Dances, where a big boxbelly spun her skinny duck’s-arsed tough-guy-shirt-wearin' husband around the dance floor while I honked na-na-na-na-na backed by Rod and Doug on 'bone.

Fast forward about 20 years…younger days jamming with friends (Aneurism Blues and Boxbelly Woman) but then a saxophone hiatus of about 15 years where my horns were in storage and we worked and travelled all around the world. Typical hooey of being too busy with career or whatever, because being a good horn player takes serious work. But I always loved the music and accumulated a massive CD collection…only to have it stolen in yet another wretched move. In that one our entire household disappeared, unbelievable. Come 2004 and working in Kazakhstan where it was deathly boring, I thought and thought about playing again rather than just passively listening. After about a year I eventually got off my duff and bought a clunky communist-era Czech-made Amati tenor from one of the office drivers who had played sax in the Soviet circus. At $350, it was the only horn in town. I took it down into the basement and from the moment I blew it, I wondered why I ever quit playing in the first place, and why I had dithered so long about playing rather than just picking up a horn and doing it. Something clicked and I’ve played pretty much every day since. Just lost 15 years in the process. I've since concentrated on playing tenor as the pitch range fits my hearing best, and it is complicated enough to play one horn relatively well, although lately I have been blowing a bit of alto just so I don’t totally lose it. When I started playing again I just wanted to play a few notes, a few phrases, in the mindspace of Sonny or Pres or any of the giants. After I played for a while that wasn’t enough and I found I could actually play the music, even if at a minor league level.

My Musical Biography, Part 2

Fast forward to college. Growing up in Terre Haute I didn’t hear any jazz (though I later discovered that Duke played one of his last road gigs at Mr. Boos on Third Street). 16 years old at Harvard where my classmates included Yo Yo Ma, who was already a recording artist, and Jerry Harris, who went on to play bass with Sonny Rollins. I liked music so I went down to WHRB in the ancient Memorial Hall basement and joined up. I didn’t know enough about music to get any on-air work at first so I began by running the boards in the control room. I was good at it and found a lot of work there, and eventually got on the air.

My exposure to jazz began at the deep end, with Coltrane and Dolphy, and I pretty much immediately lost interest in rock and such (although I have retained some fondness for hillbilly music). The radio station had a huge record library and WHRB had the custom of suspending regular programming during reading and exam periods in favor of “orgies” dedicated to individual artists or styles. I did a 24-hour Monk orgy at one point and we put Monk on the cover of the program guide that month. Once while I was spinning a Bird disc late at night Roy Haynes actually called me on the phone to tell me he was the drummer on that record! What really ruined me was taking A.B. Spellman’s Black Music course, which started with Jelly Roll and ended with The Art Ensemble, with Pops, Duke, the Count, Bean, Pres, Bird, Miles, Trane, Mingus, Ornette, Dolphy, and Cecil Taylor in between. Ornette and Albert Ayler are the mainstream of the tradition. I used to set up the sound system for class; once I sat some equipment down on A.B.’s peanut butter crackers and his famous retort was “Get off my cracker, cracker”. ROFL.

After a year or so of listening to records, hanging out with hard core fanatics, and hearing live music at Boston’s Jazz Workshop, I was compelled to play again. I got a Bundy alto in Terre Haute over the summer. By the time I was a junior and living in Dunster House we would jam on weekends in the basement piano rooms. There was a cat named Phil Gardner who could already play like Bird and I was a talentless near beginner in comparison. Senior year I took an independent music course and studied saxophone with Hankus Netsky from New England Conservatory on a study-exchange program. Hankus is now famous for leading the Klezmer Conservatory Band and at one point was head of jazz studies at NEC. In my first lesson he made me transcribe Miles’ solo from So What. Jeez.

My Musical Biography, Part 1

I don’t know how I caught the bug for saxophone. I certainly didn’t come from a musical family. My parents had a Dean Martin record, a Frank Sinatra record, and Andy Williams singing Moon River. My big brother once had a friend who played accordion at Bar Mitzvahs when I was real small. We had an organ in the living room but nobody in the family could play it. My parents were a young couple in New York in the late 40’s around the time 52^nd Street was hot, so maybe that rubbed off on me somehow. My dad did have an 8-track tape player in his car.

I grew up in rust belt Terre Haute, Indiana and went to the world’s best elementary school ever, the Lab School. In fifth or sixth grade music was mandatory and we were divided into choir, orchestra, and band. I couldn’t sing worth a darn and still can’t, so choir was out; I hated the sound of violins and still do, so orchestra was out; so band was it for me. I remember being taken into the band instrument room at Lab School and staring in awe at the racks of instrument cases. I still remember the smell – the musty old instrument case aroma of my current practice room reminds me of that – cognitive bliss since sensory memory is so intense. My first instrument was a plastic Bundy clarinet. My first band teacher was the legendary Wilburn Elrod. In junior high we took the yellow school bus up to Elkhart, then the band instrument capital of the world, and toured the Conn factory. Wow. Must’ve been a few years before some wise accountant figured that moving production to Tijuana would save a few bucks.