First posted on Facebook, March 11 2015
Introducing a long-lost best friend.
This is a picture of my tenor sax in its first real outing since 1998. He was last out for fresh air with me long before Facebook was even a domain name…
It’s a “love story” of me and this sculpted tube of metal, and a best friend, that all started when I was 15. I just have to celebrate the occasion by indulging in a little documenting…
So in 1991, I had saved up enough after promising myself a tenor sax and starting to play jazz after I had finished my grade VIII classical clarinet exams. I cashed out 1200 pounds sterling from a bank account to go up to London, with it all in my pockets, planning to haggle for a cash discount from the leading woodwind store in town. I got it – the sax and the discount. And an idolisation of the sound of the tenor became my own practise.
Blowing was easy, improvising with any kind of fluency was hard, back in 1991 as a 16 year old.
My best buddy Tim Trevor-Briscoe, in our shared spirit for music and hours and hours sitting side by side and competing too, on clarinet mostly…was an endless inspiration and challenge to keep up with. He could always tongue at double my pace (google it), which made me sad, but I thought I could keep up on tone.
Then three years playing at (high) school in informal jazz bands, and a competition winning rendition of Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, playing the sax and clarinet solos. I was madly in love with a girl for a year then (15.5 to 16.5 years old 😉 – we used to talk of running away because my parents didn’t approve and I promised I’d only bring my sax and anything I could pack into the case and one back-pack…:)
On introvert and quiet teenage nights, I’d lie awake listening to Coltrane’s a Love Supreme in total absorption – one particular night after the death of a friend was almost soothingly drugged by the kaleidoscopic colour of the Part I solo.
Tim Trevor-Briscoe and I went off up into London to see live jazz in those teenage years, had tickets to see Dizzy Gillespie in 1991 and then he got sick and never rescheduled. I can still picture the day I saw the letter from the Royal Albert hall on the doormat. I’d read of Dizzy’s stomach cancer diagnosis earlier that week (used to flick through all the newspapers jazz reviews columns). I was more disappointed than the letter that told me of my rejection from Cambridge Uni.
I’d drag Dad to obscure Surrey pubs to see the best of the UK’s tenor players on a Sunday lunch after rugby. He would nod and tap his foot and look at his sporto skinny son with mud on his legs from morning rugby practise rocking like a drugged nutter in some long sax solo.
Four years at Edinburgh Uni then from 1994, playing in the pit orchestra for amateur musicals. Another love serenaded through music. Separated somewhat though from best buddy Tim Trevor-Briscoe by a year-gap and his soaring talent and focus on acting during Edinburgh days.
Then from 1998 surfing, rugby, London wah-socializing, having to do your own washing and financial exams on the weekends took over. He (sax) went from cupboard to loft, taken out occasionally in an Victorian paper-walls apartment and too shyly blown, and put back in the box in disgust at the hideous tone.
I watched more dedicated friends expand in their tone, their musicality, their public playing. I loved that for them. It pained me too. Life and under-attention to what music meant to me took over.
So when I packed up my life to head to Australia to study Environmental Economics in 2002, I could hear the squealing from my locked-up lost friend in the dusty attic of a Peckham apartment. I couldn’t bear the lack of use – I couldn’t just lock it up in storage – and so offered him to Tim Trevor-Briscoe, who had moved to Bologna and was a semi-pro by then was fast becoming well known for his intense style and persity across clarinet and alto. Tim took my tenor over to Bologna and blew some real character into it over 5 years, and Tim is today one of the leading alto and soprano jazzmen.
It was of some kind of solace that at least my horn was being well-used, and put to much better use than I would.
But a giant giant source of my spirit as a teenager was sitting more and more distantly in the past.
Not playing bugged me and bugged me over the years. The surfing led to now 7 surfboards and 5 wetsuits, and plenty of wave time across Australia, Europe and now into California. But my tenor still buried in a cupboard.
But I think our giant sources of spirit in life never leave us. We can turn our backs and get too busy, grabbing at new toys. But deep spirit is deep spirit and a screaming truth, and the energy and connection sitting in that won’t hide forever.
Every time I heard a tenor somewhere, saw best buddy of old Tim Trevor-Briscoe, at Christmas back in Surrey, UK where we grew up messing around in forests, or thought about my sax, it was a twisting thorn of infideilty to that spirit.
When I moved to San Francisco, I planned to buy an electric piano (you can play in an apartment with earphones on) to get hitting chords again and keep my ear alive until I owned a big enough back yard or detached house to blow the crap out of my tenor again.
A few years back Tim Trevor-Briscoe returned my tenor, telling me it was time to take him back and getting playing again. But my sax stayed in the cupboard, too busy blah blah (and I don’t even lose too much life to facebook…!).
THEN…
….last Christmas Tim Trevor-Briscoe gave me a mouthpiece from his days playing my tenor, a Berg Larsen. At the same time he asked me to be godfather to one of his sons, and we had a wonderful winter baptism celebration and reunion this Christmas with Aron Rollin too, a tone deaf but jazzy actor from our school crew. Both meant the world to me, and brought me deep into that spirit of old. Our giant wells of spirit never leave us.
For three years, I said to Tim Trevor-Briscoe I’d start playing again, but surfboards, suits, planes and badly-sound-insulated apartments were too easy an excuse.
And last month, I called up the Blue Bear School of Music in San Francisco, booked a lesson with the magical Jim Peterson and just showed up. Tenor sax. Dusty in case. An embouchure from 1998. Finger synapse memory first mapped out in 1991.
A few Tuesdays ago I blew, my horn again (Paul Redmayne-Mourad leave your filth comments for other posts). The note didn’t even hold, splitting into three sounds (pros strive to do that deliberately, but with my flabber-tone it’s pretty ugly). The noise was akin the Bay’s fog horn. Jim asked me to play a G and I had no idea. I laughed. He laughed. My finger’s remembered nothing and I started to empathise with people that talk about the ageing brain.
And then, with 10 minutes, 20 minutes, it started to come back. My digits remembered scales and (kind of) arpeggios. Jim would ask me how many sharps in a certain chord structure: some came straight back, others needed nudging…each minute of progress provoked smiles, laughter, almost tears. Deep reversion to myself as a teenager.
By the end of my first hour, I hugged Jim in thanks for a spirit can-opened again. It’s amazing what remains in our muscles despite years of dormancy.
And last night I played again for the fourth time in a month, my tone filling out again, scales smoothing, confidence returning. I blew through a pain of this week, just as I had done in hours of practise as a teenager. Woodwind instruments are one giant long endless exhale…doing to your brain what an exhale does to a smoker on a street corner or a yogi practises.
End of story, just had to share and document. Playing the tenor again last night welled tears in my eyes like paddling out when you’ve been dry docked for two months, and soothed a pain of this week. Tim Trevor-Briscoe – thank you so much for your inspiration and belief in me, and now Jim Peterson too. Something so coarsely left behind is found again.
When Jim asked me at the beginning of my first lesson what my goal was, I shared with him an easy baseline: “just to be playing again”.