Happy Tunes

The late Arnie Lawrence, my musical guru, once said that he didn't like playing "I Can't Get Started," because the title and the lyrics are pessimistic. Arnie was definitely a man who found it easy to get started, which I'm not. But I don't share Arnie's aversion to that song, because it's also full of self-aggrandizement. Another song about having the world stacked up against you is "Everything Happens to Me," here sung with convincing self-pity by Chet Baker (his improvisation on the trumpet doesn't sound sad at all, by the way). I bet Arnie never played it once. Another song that seems to court disaster is "Comes Love," which is too cute to inspire sadness. This is Artie Shaw's version, a man to whom love came often enough.

The repertoire of standards also contains a bunch of optimistic songs, like "Happy Talk" from South Pacific, "I'm just a Lucky So and So," "What a Wonderful World" (which is played so often, it's beyond a cliche), and "Oh What a Beautiful Morning (a particularly corny version)." In general I'm fairly indifferent to the lyrics of the standards I play, aside from the title, which, I know, is an error. But in this historical moment, in the midst of a pandemic and a failing economy, it's not such a bad idea to sing something hopeful. When a song is happy, beyond its title, it carries you along.

A lot of Schubert's Lieder are pretty maudlin. Maybe you're supposed to feel good when you hear them: at least I'm not as miserable as him! And a lot of blues songs are also full of self-pity. But I've always been drawn to the peppy songs, like Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives. It's inspiring that those oppressed black people were able to find and communicate so much joy in music.

Recently I've been working in several musical directions. With a pianist friend, I've been playing Piazzola pieces on the flute, and I've also been working on a pretty difficult set of flute sonatas by Locatelli. Piazzola tends to be a bit over the top, but it's great to be called upon to express so much emotion. Locatelli is inventive and decorative, fun to play (or it would be fun, if I could play up to speed). But the most fun for me is to sit down with the Realbook or something similar and play a bunch of standards. Just this morning I played "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" on the baritone sax and couldn't get over how brilliant Richard Rodgers was. Where the lyrics go, "and it looks like it's climbing clear up to the sky," the melody stays on the same note!

The other thing I do is play whatever I remember by heart, or just phrases, and then noodle around on the instrument. Sometimes I do something sort of technical, like playing all the pentatonic scales, but mainly I keep trying to connect my mind, my ears, and my instrument more and more closely. That makes me happy.

Bach, Mozart, Charlie Parker, my Baritone Saxophone

For a change I played my heavy, awkward baritone saxophone this morning (this is a picture of the kind I have). I often joke that owning a baritone saxophone is a lot like owning the ball was, when I was a kid. If you owned the ball, and they were choosing up sides, they had to let you play. I play the bari in a community orchestra and in a sax quartet. However, because of the Corona Virus, both the orchestra and the quartet have suspended rehearsals, giving me less of an incentive to concentrate on the bari and more incentive to try out my other saxophones, and even my clarinet. This morning, however, I lugged my baritone out and played it. Every time I pick up one of my instruments (except the clarinet), I remember how much I love it.

Years ago I bought (yes, bought, didn't download or copy from someone else) two of the Bach cello suites, arranged for baritone saxophone, and I have worked on them sporadically. This morning I played through the first one on the baritone - not very well, but that's not the point. Playing the suite as an exercise is more valuable musically than playing any exercise I can think of.

Similarly, I have been playing some Mozart duets on the flute, knowing I'd never learn them well enough, but using them to improve my tone and to deepen my understanding of music. When you play Mozart, there are frequently moments when you say to yourself, "How did he ever think of that?" Suddenly he inserts a new theme or does something that makes his endless musical creativity clear. I don't get exactly the same feeling when I play Bach, though playing his music always makes me admire it more. The music develops essentially out of itself, evolving and going where you might not expect it to go, but doing it the way an evenly flowing river becomes a rapids for a while and then flows along calmly again.

After I played through the Bach suite, I picked up the Charlie Parker Omnibook (which I also bought and paid for) and played four or five of his songs. They are astonishingly compressed, impatient, jagged, refreshing after Bach's long developments.

Does Anyone Need Five Saxophones?

Aspiring amateurs (who can afford it) invest in equipment. Maybe Mr. X takes boring pictures, but he has six cameras and seventeen lenses and a gadget bag full of filters and a closet full of tripods and lights. So I have five saxophones, two clarinets, four or five recorders, and a bunch of ethnic instruments.
Of the five saxophones, I mainly play two: the baritone and the alto. I play the baritone in a big band, and I practice on it a lot, because I'm not exactly the strongest player in the band, and I have to keep my level up. I've been playing alto because it's in the same key as the baritone, so if I learn a song on one instrument, I can play it easily on the other, without transposing it again. I bought an inexpensive soprano about a year ago, and I play it on and off. My tenor has been in the hands of an instrument repairman for ages - that's another story. The fifth saxophone is an old C Melody saxophone that's sort of for sale, but no one in his or her her right mind would buy it, so I plan to take it back from the shop where it's been on sale, and maybe I'll try to overhaul it myself. If I do, I'll also invest (finally) in a C melody mouthpiece rather than use a tenor mouthpiece.
As for the clarinets, one of them is a metal G clarinet that I bought in Turkey, and I can barely play it. The key system is an old-fashioned one, even older than the Albert system that German clarinetists use, and the finger holes are so far apart that I have to stretch my fingers to play it. The other clarinet is an ordinary French wooden clarinet that I bought used a few years ago, and I play it now and then - I'm always surprised that I can play clarinet at all, but that was my main instrument 50 years ago, and your fingers don't forget.
Oh yes, I almost forgot my EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument), a wind-controlled synthesizer with 100 built in sounds. I've been playing it fairly regularly with my wife (who plays piano) and our friend, a flautist. We play trios, from early baroque through classical. If I tried to play the trios on a saxophone or clarinet, I'd have to transpose, and, since we're mainly sight-reading, I couldn't really play well enough. With the EWI I don't have to transpose. It has flute-like and oboe-like sounds that fit in pretty well with piano and flute. I can even play a cello part on the EWI (it has a 7 octave range!), though reading bass clef is hard for me. Oddly, I can read bass clef easily on the piano, but not on an instrument that usually uses treble clef. When the cello part is written in tenor clef, I really lose it.
For quite a while my strategy was to concentrate on the baritone, to decide that was my main instrument and to work on it. But when I pick up another horn, I find I enjoy playing that one too, so I'm thinking of adopting a different strategy: going from horn to horn every day that I practice. Two days ago I played clarinet, yesterday I played the soprano, and today I plan to play the alto or the baritone.
Even though a saxophone is a saxophone, as Gertrude Stein ought to have said, there is a big expressive difference between the soprano and the baritone - obviously - and each of the horns offers something different to the musician.
I find that playing the EWI is essentially different from playing my acoustic instruments, probably because neither the sound nor the pitch depend on my embouchure. There's something abstract about playing it, and I conceptualize the music differently.
I certainly don't need five saxophones and an assortment of other instruments, but if I had to sell all but one of them, I don't know how I'd choose.