Column: Music man
When I was in the 4th grade, I began taking group clarinet lessons, though in this day and age, I doubt many public schools offer such musical opportunities. I was issued a battered metal instrument that had withstood many years in the hands of dozens of kids like me.
I was good enough that my parents soon bought me a new clarinet of black plastic — “Ebonite,” it was called. This provided a temporary impetus to practice more, but I quickly reverted to letting my natural ability take over. After a year or so, I would routinely be dragged, sometimes literally, in front of family company by my father to play some tune to hearty applause.
In 5th grade, the school’s band performed a short concert of profoundly uncomplicated classical music at a PTA meeting. It was here that I had my first solo in public. It, too, was pretty fundamental, a mournful air of some kind, but I remember nailing it as our music teacher accompanied me on piano.
Hearty applause ensued.
Our high school was large and was noted for its musical program, regarded as one of the best in the St. Louis suburbs. You won your chair in the band’s seating hierarchy through auditions. For some reason, these never spooked me, and my friend and fellow clarinetist, Richard McDonnell, would battle fiercely each year to become first clarinetist.
Sophomore year, he won. Junior year, I won. Senior year, he was first clarinetist of the band; I was first clarinetist of the orchestra, the more prestigious position.
My brother, three years older, had taken up the alto saxophone in grade school but never had the knack for it and in junior high I started to fool around with the second-hand instrument my parents had bought for him. I quickly found out that I enjoyed playing the saxophone more than the clarinet.
By this time I had become a rabid jazz fan and had my first dreams of becoming a competent jazz saxophonist, not a name player in my own right but perhaps a steadily working studio musician. My parents traded in the used saxophone for an excellent new one, a Selmer Mark VI, which in certain ranges of serial numbers is one of the most sought-after altos in the past 60 years. It was a beautiful object.
My friend Richard and I and some other guys started fooling around with some simple jazz pieces and soon were recruited by a younger trumpet player to join a dance band he was forming to play for local school proms and other social functions. This kid, who played lead trumpet was quite the showman. We wore white tuxedo jackets and had monogrammed music stands that made us look rather professional.
During the school year, we worked steadily and we usually got paid, $10 or $20 per band member. In 1964, we played for our senior prom. But the Beatles had arrived that year and dance bands at proms, or anywhere else young people congregated, immediately became extinct.
I decided to study at Northwestern University, which had an excellent music school. While most of my friends were agonizing over essays and cramming for achievement tests, I was polishing my audition tape with my high school musical director.
Along with my brother, another graduate from my high school was at Northwestern, the eminent soul jazz altoist David Sanborn. He was one year older and had already played gigs with local R&B bands and was something of an idol to us.
One time, four of us, including Sanborn, entered a county-wide classical musical competition, playing a very fast and difficult piece. We got all A’s, except for one category, interpretation. C or D, the judge said, way too jazzy.
At Northwestern, I joined my brother’s fraternity. That’s what you did back then and I think I can safely say that I was the sole member of the Northwestern Phi Delta Theta house to be enrolled in the music school — ever.
While I was buying a tuning fork and books on music theory, I couldn’t help looking at the piles of books on philosophy, history and economics, to say nothing about the stacks of ancient and contemporary literature.
I studied with one of the world’s best classical saxophonists. Unlike my earlier habits, I labored many hours a day in the hive of practice rooms in the white, rundown Victorian music building. My technique improved dramatically, but I realized I lacked the improvisational gene that was required for my jazz career.
And I had no desire to perform as a classical saxophonist. So at the end of the first semester, I transferred to the liberal arts track and started studying all those books I wanted to read.
And Sanborn? He bailed out early in his sophomore year and went off to study with a venerable if somewhat obscure jazz alto player. I mostly forgot about him until 10 years later when I cranked up my just-purchased Stevie Wonder album, “Talking Book.” On side one, track four, an alto saxophone kicks in. Instantaneously I knew it was Sanborn.
I had also bought a B.B King album that day. On the final cut of side two, it happened again. It’s Sanborn, and he’s wailing. Today, of course, he is a star.
The last time I played was in 1980. The Newspaper Guild at the Providence Journal, where I worked, put on an annual night of satirical skits and I was in the small pit band.
As for the great Selmer, it’s in the upstairs closet and would need a complete overhaul if I ever decided to start playing again. It’s one of my life’s mysteries — and there aren’t many — why I haven’t picked it up years ago. It’s not that I squandered a great gift. It’s that it was so enjoyable to play and be heard. Which reminds me of a story.
In high school a proudly nerdy oboist in the orchestra assembled his own personal wind quartet to play exactly one piece, a modernist work by Francis Poulenc, which the oboist deeply admired. It was haunting, ethereal and difficult. We had to meet at his house on several weekends before he judged that we had played the piece to his satisfaction.
As we were packing up to go, he asked me if I recalled the solo I had performed at the PTA meeting in 5th grade. Of course, I said. Well, my father recorded it, he said, and he plays it every night after dinner.
