Just finished teaching the morning class, got a few free moments to write while I'm waiting for the next dose of caffeine to kick in.

The little sax icon reminds me of when I was in high school and I took music class in grade 9. You had to start the music classes in grade 9, and it was concert band, so you picked your instrument in that first class. It was a big school but the music program was very underfunded. This was back in the days when funding was geared more towards sports and less in the arts. As an aside, it's interesting to note that this changed in later years: the schools got more and more funding for arts and music programs in addition to the sports programs, and they encouraged students to participate in extra-cirricular activities. Today however, there is hardly any funding at all in public schools for sports, arts and music, clubs and cultural/religious groups, or even academic groups. So students no longer have access to these kinds of activities when they're not in school. Instead, they go hang out on the streets, eat fast food, watch shitty TV and play video games. Meanwhile, people are wondering why youth crime has gotten so high, why kids are getting overweight, and why they have virtually no attention span. Sad.

Rant over. So anyway...

Grade 9, music class. First class of the term, first music class in high school. The teacher does the usual course introduction - what the course covers, what we will be learning - and explains that we pick an instrument, and that will be our instrument for the first 4 years of music class, and in the 5th year we can experiment with other instruments. Cool. So I'm thinking, I want to play the saxophone. I have always loved the sax. I listened to a lot of classical music as a kid, and thought it was nice, and I thought it would be cool to learn to play something. But when I heard a jazzy song with a sax solo in it, I would be totally blown away. I wish I could tell you what the first thing was I heard that got me hooked.. it would be so cool if I could sit here and name some song by some amazing artist and do that whole inspiration speech, but I honestly don't remember what I first heard or even when I heard it.. it's like something I always knew.. like I was born with that sound in my head already and was just expecting to hear it.

So the teacher is mentioning that the school has three alto saxes, one tenor and one baritone, but the baritone is busted so we can't pick that one. That's ok by me, I don't care if it's a tenor or an alto, as long as I get to learn to play one. Well this one guy in the class asks right off if he can play the tenor sax and the teacher says fine. I'm thinking, no problem, alto then, how cool...

Well shit, have you ever gone to school with one of those annoying girls, the kind who's in the "popular group", who wears all the stupid tee-shirts of the no-talent pop-culture bands, who dresses like some dumb actress or singer... Squeals and giggles all the time, whispers to the other girls about the other kids' clothes or hair or some other trivial detail... Who won't talk to you because you're just not cool enough. You know the one I mean. There were three of them. This pissy little band of airheads that annoyed me constantly. After Tenor Sax had gotten dibs, Airhead#1 yells out that she and her playmates want to play the alto saxes. Airhead#2 elbows the other two Airheads and giggles, and Airhead#3 looks over at cute Tenor Sax, who is now getting a woody at the prospect of playing his instrument next to the three mindless twats. I'm sure he copped a feel from each one of them before the end of the term...

I was so pissed off. Those three tits didn't even give a shit about playing such an incredible instrument, they just wanted to sit next to Tenor Boy. I was fuming in my seat. I wanted to shove those saxophones up their fat asses right then and watch their eyes bug out of their frosty-coated lids. My graphic thoughts were interrupted by the voices of the rest of the students as they made their claims on the rest of the instruments available. I thought, fine - move on, pick something else. For some reason I remembered this guy from grade school that I used to hang out with sometimes.. he was just another wierdo like me, so we found a kind of connection in being unsociable together. We would sit in the library over lunch, reading at the same table while everyone else was out doing the usual kid stuff, and not even speaking, except maybe once in a while one of us would say, "..what do you think of this.." regarding some book or movie or piece of music. He used to talk about how much he loved Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman all the time.. he used to play his Dad's records at home, and his dad would get so mad, "...don't touch my fucking records, kid!" So this boy's face popped into my head, and the decision was made right then: the clarinet!

It turned out that I just adored the sound of the clarinet and the kinds of tones it could produce. The lower register was dark and mysterious, the middle could be mellow yet vibrant at the same time, and the highest was playful. I loved playing third clarinet in the concert band because I loved the darker sounds, and I loved playing behind the main melody and hearing how the notes wound together. I remember in the second year we got a new teacher who loved the old Swing and Big Band music. One of the first pieces he gave us was Glen Miller's "Tuxedo Junction". He put on a record and played it for us before he let us go through it, and I swear, I almost had an orgasm listening to this song, I loved it that much! I got hooked on Glen Miller after that, and then Tommy Dorsey, and then Duke Ellington, and on and on and on... I could listen to those guys all day.

After leaving high school, I didn't play for a very long time.. there just wasn't money to purchase an instrument or take lessons when there were always bills to pay and work to get to. Eventually, after I started teaching, I made enough money to buy a reasonably nice clarinet - a real grenadilla-wood clarinet, not a plastic one. I still had all my clarinet books, so I dug those up and started plowing through them again. I was never very good at the clarinet; I am a much better listener than a player, and since I don't practice much, I actually suck pretty bad! My talents certainly do not lie in the playing of musical instruments. But I don't care... it feels good to play it, anyway.

But I still want to learn to play the sax!

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