I’m sitting here listening to someone nearby practicing on a trumpet. There are attempts at maintaining a singular note that squawk and crumble. There are occasions of what on a trumpet are something like harmonic steps, maybe fifth notes that I am familiar with from my bugle playing days. I was probably 11 or 12 years old and my parents had gotten me a new bugle. I was a boy scout and don’t recall whose idea it was I should become a bugler, there’s or mine.
Now the neighbor is doing halting scales. they sometimes get as far a 5 or 6 notes before the sounds collapse into that squawking sound. Its funny how I find myself hanging on each attempt, wondering if the entire scale will be achieved. I’m that invisible audience that is internally cheering them on.
What I find interesting is that every now and then, whoever the player is, just blows and comes out with some actually good sounding riffs. Then its right back to the scale attempts that always end in a cacophonous collapse to the squawk.
I can relate to this. As a child I wanted badly to play the trumpet. There was something about its very strong and positive musical statement that it made, especially when it was payed muted and the notes were bent in jazz and blues tunes. Maybe that explains the bugle. On the bugle, I didn’t have to learn scales, just those harmonics that made up the various bugle calls, revely, taps, etc. I don’t remember at what age I began playing music but, my first musical instruments were an ocarina, then a harmonica and a ukulele. I got fairly conversant with the harmonica since my dad was a good tutor. He had begun playing his harmonica on a vaudeville stage in Port Townsend when he was about 8 years old. When he met my mom in his early twenties, he was a saxophonist and clarinetist in local jazz dance bands. Benny Goodman was one of his idols as I recall.
My practicing neighbor just accomplished a complete scale both up and down, all eight notes. It was done rapidly and was quite successful in both tone and rhythm. Now they’re back the slower and definitely not as successful attempts. Now the notes are running: do-re-mi-blapph; do-re-muophtx. The neighborhood dogs are starting to bark, its that bad.
I could easily find this awful noise an irritant, an unneeded distraction on this beautiful warm, sunny Sunday morning while I am trying to write. To my pleasant surprise I find it inspiring. At first I thought of putting in my earplugs but now I hope the playing, if that’s what it can be called, continues.
So why is it easier to play a scale on a trumpet faster than slower? Perhaps its what I think they call amature, how you shape your mouth and position your tongue in mating with the mouthpiece; that careful pursing of the lips required to make a trumpet produce sound. The slower, or more aptly, sustained notes need to have a totally consistent pressure of the lips applied to the mouthpiece. This requires the development of the muscle control of the lips. Add to this the force of the wind blown through it. This is the crafting part of playing music. Mastery of these laborious at first details of playing an instrument is required in order to play music so the craft part is a positive contributor to the performance.
But what about those beautiful riffs I heard interspersed? They did consist mostly of rapidly played notes but, there was also a bit of sustained harmony as well.
I once decided to take up playing the sax, to follow in my dad’s path perhaps. I figured that maybe I had inherited sax genes from him. There certainly wasn’t any DNA for accordion or piano, both of which I spent several years and considerable amounts of my parents money on trying to learn. Picture a skinny little kid with that huge 120 bass Enrico Roselli accordion. Or, on the bench of a piano with my sister playing a duet in recital. the picture may be OK but I can’t attest for the sound. It all was a struggle for me.
I had found a persisting ability to play the harmonica and that fed nicely into my immersion into playing it when I was first separated from my family due to marital issues. I was living alone in an abandoned 3-story nurses’ quarters at the former site of the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital atop Seattle’s Queen Anne hill. My third floor rooms had views of both the Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges. There was no heat in the building other than a fireplace in my main room, which was useless since all the heat went up the chimney. This made the lack of a refrigerator less of an issue in those winter months. Cooking was done on a coleman stove. There was however one really great feature: an enclosed stairwell that spanned all three floors and the basement. It was a huge concrete and steel echo chamber. I spent many nights there wrapped in a heavy coat and cap, playing blues and just riffing with the awesome acoustic anomalies.
After several months, I moved into an apartment on Eastlake, just south of the University bridge, not too far from where I had lived in a houseboat a decade earlier. It had heat and a real kitchen. I missed the echo chamber and the solitude that allowed me to practice and play without any audience at all. But the new apartment was on a busy street,under the Interstate-5 bridge over the ship canal and my downstairs neighbor was a cabinet shop complete with noisy power tools.
I played along with records of my favorites; Clifton Chenier, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Bill Brunzy, Muddy Waters and all the blues greats. I bought Tony ‘Little Son” Glover’s book on playing the blues harp (harmonica). I enjoyed playing along, bending, warping and holding long mournful notes punctuated with sensuous vibrato. I learned a lot.
This led to the saxophone. I rented a tenor sax, one that’s a little bigger and plays deeper notes that the more common alto. It was a Buesher, like my dad had played. It cost only $10 per month from a local music store, Kennely-Keyes.
My dad was still living then and gave me a few pointers on shaving reeds and breaking them in. I took it to his house once so he could try it out. It had been decades since he had played Stardust in the darkness of our living room when I was just three. He wasn’t too pleased, nor surprised by his loss of mastery.
I played along with records for awhile, getting acquainted with the complex keying and reed pressure changes. I was getting comfortable with the sounds I could make but had no idea how anyone else might perceive them. A guy I worked with at Walter Dorwin Teague Associates, Eric Hagerstrom, said he played the piano and had recently met a friend through his new wife that played a stand-up bass and dobro (a steel guitar). He suggested that since we all were into blues and jazz that we should get together sometime and jam. Since Eric had the piano, we met at his place on an evening when his wife was out.
These guys were far beyond me musically. Eric had played piano for years and knew many jazz standards and was able to improvise on some more abstract stuff as well. Mick (Mike Heltsley, subsequently founder of an art school and one of Seattle’s best Mexican restaurants, Agua Verde) had a beautiful old stand-up bass and a wonderful to this day dobro. He was at the time taking a class called Guitar Mechanics. He was quite accomplished already and found the mathematical approach allowing him to find new horizons for sound from his instruments, combining scale and tonal structures way beyond the ordinary. I showed up with my rented sax and my old leather doctor’s bag full of harmonicas, a jews harp, some kazoos and a washboard with several attachments and an assortment of thimbles to play it with. The attachments to the standard wooden-framed metal washboard included a cowbell, a couple jar lids and a kid’s cymbal and a foot-long screen-door spring. It was a small rhythm section on a neck strap.
At first I played rhythm accompaniment on the washboard and chimed in occasionally on the harp (blues harp, harmonica) which was held to my mouth on a neck support I had gotten for it. After a few numbers, both musically and herbally, they convinced me to get on the sax. I expressed my hesitation, explaining my novice level and feelings of inferiority, and gave it a shot.
We started out with some slower jazz stuff and I was able to ease into playing along, moving in and out of the melodies. It was surprising to me, it felt good! Was it just the beers, the good Columbian?
Eric brought out a reel-to-reel recorder. We had to find out what it sounded like. When you are playing like we had, at least for me – its hard to tell. When you are playing its like you ARE the music. It has color, light, sound and texture and the connection with the shared rhythms and melodic ramblings is all that exists at that moment. We decided to record about a half hour of playing. We wanted to be sure we had time enough to actually forget that we were recording.
It worked. Eric sort of took the lead by playing a familiar jazz tune, something smooth but mellow, nothing Kenny-G over-sweet. Mick’s thoomb, thoomb, dhoomb on the bass added a flowing warmth, alternating between melody and accompaniment. I floated in and out on sax, harp and percussion. It was like we were both singing and talking with one another, bouncing notes and progressions back and forth, weaving their colors into a tapestry of groove. When we played it back it sounded better than I thought it would. My part was probably the weak link. Sure, there were places it slowed or died or got momentarily awful but overall it wasn’t bad – for 3 graphic designers. With some editing it could have certainly sounded rather professional.
We got together every couple weeks or so. Sometimes the three of us at Eric’s, sometimes just Mick and me. He alternated bringing his dobro and bass.
One day I saw an announcement for a saxophone workshop at Joe Brazil’s music school. Joe is a Seattle jazz legend who has played with John Coltrane and others who at the time had a school housed in a community center in the Central District. I remembered seeing him a few times at the Llahngelhyn, an after-hours coffee house just south of the University Bridge across from the then infamous (not remotely like it is today) Red Robin. Musicians would drop-in to jam after finishing gigs around town. What a great place it was with the likes of poet Jesse Bernstein and musicians Chick Corea, Abdullah Ibrihim, Ralph Towner, McCoy Tyner and others, improvising and having a good time. My old friend and cohort John Rau documented many of these late night/early morning sessions in a beautiful series of black and white photographs. Perhaps I can get him to post some here or on his own site.
I decided it was time to take my playing beyond the entry level. I signed up for the classes. The instructor for the workshops was Carter Jefferson, a well known and very accomplished sax player who had backed up The Temptations, The Supremes, and Little Richard; played with Mongo SantaMaria and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and recorded with Woody Shaw. This looked like a great opportunity to learn from a true master.
I showed up at the old three or four story brick building that looked more like a monastery than a community center. Apparently it had been a Methodist (or some denomination) cathedral and school. There weren’t a lot of people around. Just someone who signed me in and introduced me to Carter. We talked a bit about my interest and intentions and then he led me downstairs and into one of a series of wood-framed windowed cubicles. It looked like sort of a public confessional booth. Jefferson asked if I would mind his playing my sax. Of course I couldn’t say no to this master of the instrument. He took it gently, ran his fingers up and down its keys, trying the feel of their action and response. He gave what appeared to be an assenting nod and brought the instrument slowly but purposefully up to his mouth. As his breath started to blow softly through the reed it began to emanate the softest, sweetest notes I had ever heard from my $10-a-month rented sax that I had been struggling to learn those past months. I didn’t recognize the tune but the way he easily moved through a range of notes in varying keys and with a dynamic rhythm was phenomenal. I couldn’t believe my ears. Here I was, getting a one-on-one solo performance from one of the world’s top jazz musicians. It was hypnotic. He didn’t play long but it was definitely sweet. He had me do a few scale exercises and, after my hour was up, sent me home with an assignment to learn to play scales in all the keys.
I was floating on a cloud as I carried my instrument out to my car, the notes of Carter Jefferson still reverberating in my head and soul. I hardly remembered anything of the drive home, his mellow notes and tones replaying so clearly in my mind the entire trip. As soon as I arrived back at my apartment I set about learning to play scales in all those keys.
I practiced for a week, day and night. As the days of practice wore on, I realized that something had changed. Playing this instrument I had come to love so much had suddenly become a laborious task. I felt as if I were pushing a huge rock up a very steep hill and it was getting huger by the minute. I didn’t return for any more classes. I felt humiliated by my inability to discipline myself in learning my chops. I still got together to jam with my friends but when career and life changes moved us apart, I dropped my playing. I returned the sax to the music store.
When I had to knuckle down to the structure of doing scales in many keys I was overwhelmed by the complexity of the instrument, and how much dedication and practice was involved in its mastery. I guess I had thought that Carter Jefferson would somehow show me some “tricks” to get all those magical sounds to emanate from me through that sax. Well, he had, I just couldn’t deal with what it really involved. So, in the end, I had played a few good riffs and occasionally and accidentally a whole good number.
A little over ten years later I ran across an alto sax in the Goodwill store. It was a nice looking Conn, complete with a case. I could picture some young student carrying it to school to play in the band or something. I got it, tried it a few times and packed it away. I may bring it out sometime, taking it to some remote place, and play it for myself. I’m sure no one else would enjoy my halting, atonal ramblings and blasts that I still enjoy playing on it.
So, my trumpet playing neighbor has finished their session. I think I heard a bit of clapping and “Good going!” coming from the direction of the musical attempts. Most likely the encouraging support of parents.
A beginner can have a few brilliant moments of creative output – like my neighbor and like myself. Consistent brilliance, mastery, requires the development of craft; physically (with the instrument), conceptually and emotionally. I know now that there are more ways to master music and instruments than learning scales and there are ways of learning scales by just playing. All learning styles work. Its just a matter of which feel good to the learner. Which methods provide the challenge,engagement and reward necessary to maintain persistence in reaching for mastery. They all require dedication and desire as well as lots of practice.
I feel a resurgent desire to make some music. I’m not sure if it will involve any of my wind instruments. Possibly a talking drum or maybe something of my own making. Stay tuned.