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.

Technicalities - the Craft in any Art

Every art has its component of craft: the skill and knowledge about the materials and equipment that you use. As a serious amateur musician, I'm always trying to improve my technique, my sound, and my grasp of music. When we visit the United States -- we just returned from a twelve day visit to our children and grandchildren -- I often order are saxophone reeds, and much more occasionally saxophone mouthpieces (because they're quite expensive and tricky - you have to try them to know whether they're any good for you) on the Internet, because it's expensive and inconvenient to have them sent to us here in Israel, and there is a huge variety available on the web that no local music shop can afford to carry.
Maybe as much as ten years ago, I bought a beautiful looking metal mouthpiece for my baritone saxophone. It has a very live tone, but I've never managed to master it, to play in tune with it, to control the dynamics, to keep the tone consistent, and that frustrates me.
Theorizing that the reeds I was using with that mouthpiece were too hard, this time I bought a box of five rather soft reeds. For anyone who doesn't play a reed instrument, I should explain: the bottom line is, the harder the reed, the harder you have to blow, and the more pressure you have to exert with your lips. The advantage of a hard reed is in the solidity and intensity of the tone, and the disadvantage of playing on a soft reed is that your tone can sound flaccid, and you lose projection and volume.
Mouthpieces are the other end of the equation. The wider the tip opening (the distance between the end of the reed and the tip of the mouthpiece), the harder you have to work to get a sound out of the instrument. But if the tip opening is too narrow, your sound is choked, it's hard to play loudly, with projection, and sometimes you can even stifle the sound by squeezing the reed and mouthpiece together with your lips and blocking the air completely.
All of this is highly individual. There is no single good combination that works for everyone. In the reed-player jargon, the combination of instrument, mouthpiece, and reed is called a setup. If you go to one of the hundreds of saxophone sites on the web, you'll see descriptions of the setups that various famous musicians use. The (ridiculous) idea is that if I played on exactly the same brand of saxophone, with exactly the same kind of mouthpiece and reed as Sonny Rollins, I, too, would be able to play as well as he does.
The prudent approach would be to find a setup that works for you and stick with it. But musicians are, quite properly, never entirely satisfied with their sound. Just recently someone sent me the link to an interview about practicing with the late Michael Brecker, where he talks about trying new equipment. So I have approval for my restlessness. In the same vein, my late musical guru, Arnie Lawrence, often said that you shouldn't keep doing what you already do well. The only way to advance in your art is to keep trying new things and taking the risk of sounding bad for a while (if you're a musician).
This notion isn't limited to the craft and art of playing a musical instrument. If you're a poet, and you always write blank verse, try rhyming for a change. If you're a painter who specializes in watercolors, try acrylics or oils or printmaking.
Does art begin where the technicalities leave off? Perhaps, but without mastering the technicalities, one never leaps out into artistry.

The Old Country, as it were

So here we are at our daughter's temporary home in Rockville, MD, making up for grandchild deprivation. Every time we visit the United States, the country where we grew up, I feel odder and odder about being here. We are out of touch, even though we read the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and we follow US news on the web, and we have dozens of friends and relatives with whom we remain in contact.
But what is Rockville, MD to us? Our daughter and her family are returning to Israel this summer, and the apartment they've been living in has a temporary feel to it - hardly any pictures on the wall, hardly any investment in the place beyond the utilitarian. Compared to their house in Israel, which is decorated and cared for, this place seems a bit like a motel room they've been camping out in.
Our son, by contrast, has settled in here in the United States. He attended university and law school, and, after working for a big firm for 6 years, he's gotten a job with the US government. He and his partner have bought a charming house in an area in DC called Friendship Heights, and they've been working steadily at making it their home.
But the Washington area was never my home, and I only know my way around here tentatively. But it's a city of tourists and transients. No one really expects you to know where you're going.
The season doesn't help me feel at home here: winter. We don't really have winters in Israel, not winters with days and days below freezing, not winter with snow permanently on the ground, not winter with cold, dry winds, not winter that makes the landscape bare and abstract.
The whole point, of course, is to be with the grandchildren, to be in their company, to hear their voices, to enjoy their energy, to watch them move with the grace and enthusiasm of healthy children, and to be thankful that they are healthy children whose parents make sure they are stimulated and enriched, without being controlling.
We're going to go to a modest ski resort in Pennsylvania with the family today. I don't imagine I'll see a lot of them! I'm not sure how much fun a sexaganarian non-skier will have up there, but I'm going along for the ride.

Time

Years ago I attended a Buddhist retreat, which was meant to be a silent retreat, but because I had volunteered to work in the kitchen, I was not bound to silence, and I exploited my freedom to speak to engage in conversation with one of the teachers. In one of his dharma talks he made the classic Buddhist argument that only the present exists: the past is only an idea, and the future is obviously even more just an idea. The purpose of this conception of time is evident: if the cause of our unhappiness in life is that we cling to ideas, then freeing ourselves of the burden of the past and concern for the future is clearly a way out of our unhappiness. During our conversations, I argued with the teacher, saying that our ability to beat out a regular rhythm is proof that the present is connected with the past and future in our very experience of time.
In the past two weeks or so, I have been working on my sense of time in music. I was shown that my failure to anchor myself in rhythm was my biggest failing as a musician in the big band. I share this weakness with many other members of the band, it turns out, and that's why we don't play tight.
This insight into my weakness came from a rehearsal during which the wind players in the band played without the rhythm section. Our conductor, Eli Benacot, turned on a metronome, which gave an extremely loud beat, but the band kept drifting away from it. He told us that this is what was happening to us when we play with the rhythm section. We generally slow up, and instead of pushing us back up to speed, the rhythm section slows up with us.
Eli explained that the major difference between the kind of music we play - jazz, Latin, and rock - and classical music is what musicians call the groove, the underlying beat that keeps going all the time: swing, funk, samba, bossa, whatever. As if we didn't know that! He told us that he once spent hours and hours playing with a metronome until he had internalized the beat.
During the break I asked Eli how we should practice with the metronome, and he had a very clear method. The main point is being able to shift back and fourth from accenting the first and third beat in 4/4 time (which is the way Western classical music works) to accenting the second and fourth beat, which is the way that jazz and jazz-related music works, something like the difference between "DAdaDAda" (trochees) and "daDAdaDA" (iambs). Eli said that it was something like learning to ride a bicycle (an analogy people use for all kinds of things): suddenly you find that you can do it.
Following Eli's exposition, not only have I been practicing with a metronome, I've also been walking around beating time as I walk (which, by the way, is an excellent form of meditation, because if your mind is entirely on the rhythm, there's no room in it for other thoughts). Yesterday evening, on the way to my pottery class (centering clay is another things people compare to riding a bicycle), I suddenly found that I was able to shift easily between trochees (DAdaDAda) and iambs (daDAdaDA) as I counted off eighth notes while I strode along. So, have I learned to ride the bicycle of rhythm? Only time will tell.
By the way, of course, all this is far from new to me. I've been playing music, including jazz, for quite a few years, so it isn't as if I had to start from nowhere. Eli gave me a way to reconceptualize and improve my sense of musical time, and I hope that it helps me to play better.

A New Way of Writing

Several mornings in the week, I take the dog to a place where I can let him wander about without danger, and I sit down on a rock or a low stone wall and write in a big fat notebook I bought in CVS or Staples on a trip to America. The dog wanders around, comes back to check on me every now and then, and finally loses patience and starts nudging me with his nose: enough writing, take me home.
I have been attending a poetry workshop for the past year or so. I began attending with a lot of misgivings and have become a convert. The teacher, Jennie Feldman, is a fine poet herself and an excellent, low key discussion leader. Gently she guides us in the direction she wants. The group, mainly women (of course), is otherwise quite diverse, in taste, in literary experience, and in goals. Parenthetically, in my musical activities, I am involved almost exclusively with men, but in my ceramics and poetry groups, I'm almost exclusively with women.
But when I write in the notebook in the morning, I don't try to write poems, though sometimes a poem does grow out of what I write. Nevertheless, I do write in separate lines, as if I were writing poetry.
When you write a phrase on one line,
And the next one on the next line,
You can see your sentences take shape,
Because, after all, it's the shape
Of your sentences
(Metaphorcially, of course)
That makes your writing what it is,
And it helps with word choice too,
Because you can see and hear the words better,
When they're sitting in broken lines.
And it's easier to revise your work.
As for writing in the notebook, my guiding ideas are twofold: first, making a moment in the day to write is a way of taking the thoughts that otherwise flit through my mind and disappear and making them sit still for a moment, so I can examine them; and, second, catching the thoughts on paper ought to give me raw material for more consequential writing later in the day, or later in my life.

Koan

On Saturday night we ran into a friend who posed us this paradox: can God create a knot that He cannot untie?
On Sunday we visited a friend, an excellent painter, in her studio, and she showed us a book of koans that inspired her work.
Then I thought of a paradox of my own.
Buddhism teaches that the self is an illusion, a mental construct. When you reach enlightenment, not a likely occurrence, you'll understand that about your "self."
So, if the self is an illusion, how can art be based on self-expression?
Or perhaps the illusion that we are ourselves is so powerful that it enables the illusion that is art.

A Brief Trip to Turkey - Cognitive Dissonance

Relations between Turkey and Israel have been deteriorating since the ascent of a Muslim political party, and the loss to Israel is immense.

I have been to Turkey five times now: once on a tour arranged by the archaeology department of the Hebrew University, once at the beginning of an overland trip from Istanbul to Tashkent with Dragoman Tours, once on the way from Macedonia to Romania with some friends, once on a weekend deal to the resort of Antalia, and now we met some friends in Istanbul, flew to Izmir, and saw some of the ancient Greek sites of the Aegean coast. Every time I have gone to Turkey, I have liked the country and its people more.

You can't exactly say that the Turks have a benign reputation. The Ottoman Empire was a dangerous rival to the kingdoms of Europe for centuries, halted at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Romantic support for the Greek revolution against Ottoman rule did not exactly make Europeans love the Turks, and the slaughter of the Armenians during World War I is a crime against humanity that the Turks haven't yet wrestled with, as far as I know. "Midnight Express" also made Turkey look very bad. When I was in college, back in the 1960s, almost no one wanted to go there.

On our first visit to Turkey we were dyed in the wool hellenophiles and prepared to dislike the Turks, but we couldn't. They were friendly and helpful, pleasant and hospitable. So much so that I find it absolutely impossible to fit what I know about Turkey - brutal suppression of the Kurds, illegal invasion and occupation of Cyprus, repression of civil rights and dissent - with my uniformly pleasant experiences there.

I am aware that, aside from reading a couple of books by Pamuk and seeing a few good Turkish films, I see Turkey very much from the outside, and I understand little of what I see. Use of the Roman alphabet makes the signs legible for us but unintelligible.

That was one of Ataturk's major reforms. He sought to make Turkey into a modern, secular state and only succeeded partially. We were there on October 29, Turkish Independence Day. The streets were full of flags and huge pictures of Ataturk. But the present government does not, I gather, wish to follow through with the program he mapped out.

Being in Turkey gave me a useful perspective and insight into the big picture of recent world history. During the twentieth century many nations achieved independence and were forced to invent or reinvent themselves, and many of these new self-definitions have proven to be false or inappropriate, ignoring too much of the historical heritage, denying the presence of minorities, and adopting institutions that did not grow up from within their culture but were imitations of those of the West. The results were catastrophic.

Indeed, the rise of fascism in much of Europe during the first half of the twentieth century shows that Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal (to name just a few) had as much trouble defining themselves for the twentieth century as Egypt, Turkey, India, and China are having in their effort to redefine and redesign themselves today.

In Turkey I am more or less impartial, not an Armenian or a Greek with a historical grudge, not a Kurd who wants independence, but an observer coming from a country with its own deep problems of conflict and self-definition. The outside observer sees problems with clarity that derives from ignorance of the details and complexities. Can one bring that perspective back home and apply it to the issues one faces there?