talking to old women about wind instruments

 The Jerusalem municipality is concerned with the plight of senior citizens (or whatever you want to call old people), so they gave a short course to a bunch of us in preparing talks to entertain each other. I decided to prepare a talk about wind instruments, essentially how and why musical instruments evolved from the pan pipe to the saxophone (not that the saxophone is the highest form of musical evolution, though some would make that claim).

Yesterday I got to give my talk for the first time at a club for what is kindly called "the third age" in the Kiryat Yovel neighborhood, and it went well enough, though I had to struggle with laryngitis. My audience consisted of about nineteen women and one man. Where do the old men go? 

I started by introducing myself and saying that for me wind instruments are special, because we power them with our breath, and we put them in our mouths - extremely intimate contact. In Hebrew, the word for the soul (neshama) is derived from the verb "to breathe" (linshom). You put your soul into a wind instrument. I mentioned that archaeologists have found bone pipes that are nearly 50,000 years old.

I brought a shopping cart full of instruments and demonstrated them briefly (too briefly): a pan pipe that my daughter brought from Peru, which I can't really play beyond getting a few notes about it; a bansuri (an Indian flute) that I bought from its maker in Mumbai, which I can sort of play; a modern Sankyo flute; a clarinet; and finally a soprano saxophone. I had kind of imagined lugging my baritone sax as well and posing the question, "How could both this monster and the slender soprano sax both be saxophones?" But I wasn't up to transporting the bari. I was also recovering from a cold and wasn't quite up to playing a lot.

What interests me, and what I tried to communicate, is how each instrument suits the music of its culture. The pan pipe is fine for the Indians of the Andes. The bansuri suits the subtle complexity of Indian music. But modern Western music demands instruments that can play in all twelve keys, plus a bunch of other things that I talked about, such as the improvement in metal working that made it possible to produce wind instruments in factories, the emergence of a public that went to concerts and bought instruments, the need for loud instruments in military bands, and so on. I also talked about the difference between a clarinet and a saxophone. And I sort of explained that the sound of a wind instrument comes from a vibrating column of air, which is lengthened and shortened by opening and closing holes in the tube. 

I made a major mistake in planning the talk, however. I ought to have prepared a short piece to play on each of the instruments as I demonstrated them. I did play some stuff, but I should have paid more attention to that aspect of the talk.

Anyway, it was pretty well received, and I enjoyed myself.

O Solo Mio

When you play jazz, you're expected to be able to solo. When you have been trained as a classical musician, to read notes accurately, it's hard to trust to get free of the notes, a bit like swimming without water wings. 

Arnie Lawrence once told me an anecdote about Dizzy Gillespie. A radio interviewer once commented that, since Dizzy and his fellow musicians played without written notes, they must make a lot of mistakes. Dizzy just laughed.

On the one hand, it's true that if you play a song by ear, without the notes before your eyes, you're liable to make mistakes. That's why big bands, jazz orchestras, have written parts. But in jazz, it doesn't exactly matter whether you play the right notes, the way it matters whether a pianist performing a Beethoven concerto with a symphony orchestra had better play exactly what Beethoven wrote. The classical performer's interpretive freedom thrives on what Beethoven didn't write. The jazz performer's interpretive freedom is much greater, not that every jazz musician who takes a solo is as profound and creative as Beethoven (to state the obvious).

Fortunately for me, in the past couple of years I've been playing in an amateur big band, where the director encourages us to solo, even if we're not very good at it. This, by the way, is in contrast to the big band that I played in for about ten years, whose director only gave solos to the musicians in the band who were best at it, so the rest of us never had practice in soloing. 

I've been getting more confident in taking solos and enjoying the risk and creativity. I heard Sonny Rollins say in an interview that when he soloed in performances, he never knew exactly what he would play. Arnie Lawrence said that when you solo you have to play what God tells you to play. I'm lightyears behind Sonny and Arnie in musical ability, but I take inspiration from them. You have to play what comes to you on the spot.

When I solo, I don't have the chord progressions firmly in my ears. I have to look at the chord symbols to guide me and keep me in the right place. But I'm getting better at hearing the changes and listening to what the band's rhythm section is playing. I'm also getting better at hearing what other soloists do, both my fellow musicians in the band, and the great professionals I hear in recordings.