Rhythm. Changes.
A lot of people “don’t get" jazz. I am one of the people who jazz gets. I first picked up a saxophone when I was 9 or 10, and I did so because it was shiny. We’d gone to the music store to look at getting a drumkit and lessons, but I got distracted.
Shortly after I started to play at Yucca Loma Elementary in Apple Valley, California, in a band directed by Armalyn De La O (who Google tells me has become the President of the California Music Educators Association, which is neat), we moved to Fresno, where I attended Manchester GATE, a school for allegedly gifted and talented children. The school had a jazz programme, as the teacher was a tubist who played in an active Dixieland group, and I had the opportunity to play at the Mardi Gras event in the city. The first cheer I can remember came in response to a very timid but musical solo on St James Infirmary. Somewhere, in a box, on a deteriorating microcassette, the almost certainly now-deceased King of Mardi Gras can be heard giving me an enthusiastic, “Yeah!”
I drifted a bit in middle school (7th and 8th grade) as we moved midway during 7th grade, and I didn’t play saxophone at the school I attended in 8th grade. As secondary school began, I intended to quit playing music. I had gone over to the high school late in 8th grade to play for the jazz director, Paul Shaghoian.
The band at the school was already known as a force, despite it being in the very early years of existence. I remember practicing in my room, with bars on the window, overheating. Anthropology was the tune I had prepared, with no reference to recordings and armed with little more than a crude understanding of swing. When, after I played, Paul demonstrated a point of feedback at tempo, I realised that I had no idea what I was doing. Dear reader, it was MUCH faster.
So, I thought I had reached the end of the road. But during band camp (stop it), as he read out the names of people he expected to audition, mine was included. I auditioned and sat 2nd alto in the 2nd jazz band. The next year, Jazz Band A was invited to perform at the International Association of Jazz Educators convention in Atlanta, and I was desperate to be involved. I practiced all summer, and when it came to the audition, I was one of the highest scorers. I sat 2nd alto in the 1st jazz band, and from there my life changed.
I had the benefit of being in a thriving place for jazz education, with incredible teachers. For all the other things that I did, playing jazz saxophone was probably at the top of the list in terms of my self-conception. I wish I had been a better person at the time, but I suppose we all wish our past selves had been a bit wiser.
Never a blistering technician, but always with a knack for the language and phrasing of jazz. I became a very good sight reader and had a host of amazing opportunities. At one point, I considered moving to Sweden to play jazz instead of going to uni. One of Miles Davis’s former bassists looked me in the eye and said in front of a room of people that I was the future of jazz. It sounds so stupid now, but it’s a thing that really happened.
The last thing I did before leaving home was lead a jazz sextet for two days at Jazz in the Pines. I went to uni, and played. Earned a scholarship to take lessons in NYC but couldn’t afford the transportation costs upfront, so it came to nothing (the saxophonist who I was going to study with came up as the author of a jazz etude book when I was compiling a Christmas list. awkward). Played a night in a Trenton dive as a quasi-audition to study with Richie Cole.
My life was falling apart at the time. Parents divorcing and all. I had found uni too easy, so created a variety of additional and unnecessary challenges to make it harder. Took a year off, returned and played some more. Then, I worked in a law firm for two years and didn’t play much.
When I went to UNLV, I again tried to pick the horn up, auditioning for the jazz ensemble even though I was at school as a music theory/composition student. I did well, but there were two excellent alto saxophonists, so I was offered the baritone saxophone chair, which I enthusiastically accepted. Dave Loeb does an amazing job with the programme, and they’ve since continued to improve. I did eventually take over the lead chair and played in the graduate jazz combo. It was a great experience, but then it was over.
When we then moved to Austin and I started at UT, the director of the jazz programme was someone I had met and studied with as he was on the faculty of a summer camp I had attended. I wrote to him to ask if I could audition, and he said yes, but I never would have been able to add it into an already overstuffed calendar (teaching, coursework, two jobs, family). So, yet again, I stopped playing.
Briefly, I played a little bit when recording my EP, as there is one track on it and one that didn’t make it which include sax. But then again, nothing. In the 16 years since I finished uni, the sax has spent 12 of them in its case.
At times, when money has been tight (as it still too often is), I have considered selling it. But money goes, and I knew that if I sold it I would never have one like it again.
All these years, jazz has had a direct link to a part of me that I can’t verbalise. Hearing the music unpicks me, as a person, and I feel cast into the fabric of sound. It has always brought me joy and sadness in equal measure, because it is in my blood, but withered so.
A few weeks ago, I took it out of the case because I thought it might suit one of the songs we’re playing. It was and is painful to feel the distance between us. But, I feel like I owe it to Paul, and to myself to try again.
Am I too old? Is it too late? Despite my well-mapped plans so swiftly abandoned (political science->law school->law->politics), all my soul has ever really wanted is a life in music. A lot of the general malaise I feel is attributable to the fact that music is a huge part of who I am but a small part of what I do, and I am conscious that I am running out of time. Some dreams don’t die.
