Tall and tanned and young and lovely

Well that was odd. It had been coming for a while, I suppose. Just waiting for the moment. And then the moment presented itself so blatantly that I saw it coming a mile off – and I was not so much powerless to resist as resigned to my fate. No, not resigned. Alright, resigned, on a bed of curious, with a side of trepidation, topped off with excitement sprinkles. We had decided to do without the backing track for The Girl from Ipanema when we filmed the uke videos last week. Music Sales’ BT is a flute solo, and Corrie wanted to sing it. And it was jazz flute. It sounded like Ron Burgundy. So we contented ourselves by signing off with “Stay classy, San Diego”, and I knew then I’d add my own soundtrack afterwards.

I finished the edit this morning, recorded some bass, some claves, and messed about with some porn organ sounds which I abandoned, and then it was time. It wasn’t actually that easy to get to. I had to shift a keyboard and a couple of guitars, and a pool cue. I had to double check the case was the right way up. I laid it on my stool and undid the latches, my fingers looking for them on the unfamiliar case. It lay, silent, obedient, like some mummified relic of a past life. In raw money, my most valuable possession: a near mint 1964 silver Selmer Mk VI alto. But by the time I bought it, at a fraction of its worth, I was already retired.

I wore out three saxophones. The Grassi I had 35 years ago from ABC in Leighton Buzzard, a cheap copy of the one I now had in my hands, is in my wardrobe and waiting for the day – any day now, probably – when Dex wants to give it a go. I busked with that for years, lost the octave key in the back of a police van in 1980, learnt to play using harmonics instead – that was the best accident I ever had. I rubbed all the lacquer away in Irmi’s bathroom, down to the raw brass, not sure why, I guess it was looking so shabby by that time I wanted it to be the same way all over. I remember my fingers being numb from the wire wool.

The Grassi, my first saxophone. Wellington, New Zealand, 1986. Complete with rubber bands, and minus lacquer. I bought the Berg Larsen mouthpiece from another boy in the Bucks Youth Jazz Orchestra in 1975 for £5. I’ve never used another.

Then an upgrade, a Yamaha from a music shop by the city walls in Nuremberg, shopping with Lazlo and Henk in 1987. I had the money to buy a decent instrument, and the intonation was great. It was second hand, just, and played well enough, in an ’80s way, that thin studio sound. It was paper thin. You could squeeze the bell with one hand. It got old. I traded it in when I got to the Guildhall in 1991. I part-exchanged it in at Allegro in Oxford for a Couesnon, a 1927 gold-lacquered songbird. Light and free, small bore, but that sound. That was my sound. People talked about my sound, they were talking about that alto saxophone. I played it a lot, and well. I mean I played it beautifully. I practiced a lot, I wrote a lot, a did a lot of gigs, a lot of teaching, a lot of playing for pleasure. And it started to fall apart around the time Dex was born. I stopped getting the niggles fixed. The felts, the corks, the pads and the springs. There was blu-tac, and rubber bands, and wax, and superglue, and it looked horrible and I played less and less as I stayed at home more and more with my little family, and when I was called for a function gig, I knew fewer and fewer of the musicians. And when I taught, it was the only time of the week I played, and for a while I kept up the teaching just to keep playing.

It felt bad. All that time invested and ability coaxed and nurtured, and whenever I looked at my broken down old sax I felt an anguish. I thought maybe if I had a new saxophone it would somehow make me a player again. So I began the hunt for a grown-up saxophone, and by turn of the Millenium we were all hooked up to the web so I scoured eBay, and researched them and tracked them for a month or two, and put in a couple of nervous bids, and then boom, I struck. I sniped. I bought it from a drunk man in Virginia. That’s a whole other story for a whole other time. I had a friend bring it over from California. And within a few weeks I was working full time in an office and didn’t gig from one year to the next, and I gave up all my teaching save a little guitar at the City Lit, and that was more to stay in touch with the City Lit than it was to stay in touch with the guitar. And now that saxophone sits seven feet from me in my office here at home.

There’s a short list of things that validate my life. Some are possessions, some are events, or achievements, or experiences. They jostle a little and come & go a little, but there are a number of constants. Some are in the past, some are in the future, one or two may have passed by unnoticed. The rest will get scratched when there’s no longer any chance or else when they become irrelevant. Fatherhood. Check. Shed. Check. Selmer Mk VI. Check.

I hadn’t played it at all in six months, and hadn’t had a proper blow for ten. I spent the morning playing solo after solo over The Girl from Ipanema accompanied by Corrie’s ukulele. Fingers had a little falling out with Ears, but they resolved to go easy on each other. The embouchure was no problem. And, since I could no longer remember all my tired old licks, I had to come up with some tired new ones, so it sounded fresh.

So what will I do? Will I play every day now, and work my way up to some sort of comeback? Will I show the world that I can still skip lyrically over the changes to Au Privave? Don’t be silly, it’s back in its case, next to the Couesnon. But I might see if I can’t get myself to a pool table, my game’s really slipped.