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Jazz Lessons

When you're a sax player living Chicago, there is an expectation that you play jazz.  

I had spent years learning to play classical music, and I was relatively good at it, but I had never played jazz.  I spent exactly one day in a jazz lab during college.  The teacher "made" me solo in front of the class and it freaked me out so bad that I immediately withdrew from the class.  (How's that for open mindedness?) 

But here I was with a degree in music, and none of the courage required to take a leap off of the printed page.  When I would tell people that I had majored in music, the next question was always, "what do you play?".  When I would answer "saxophone", they would invariably ask me if I played jazz.  When I said no, people were typically a little confused.  After all, what else does  a sax player play? 

Sure, there are saxes in the classical ensemble, but it's jazz, blues, and R&B where saxophones really shine.  Growing up in small-town Kansas, I didn't hear very much jazz, or blues or R&B for that matter.  I had one Tom Scott album (One Night One Day) that I liked to play along with, and a college girl friend had turned me on to David Sanborn.  I also had Kenny G's Duotones (which may or may not be jazz) in my collection.  However it wasn't until I moved to Chicago and found WNUA that I started to really explore "smooth jazz" and attempt to understand "real" jazz.

My friend Joe Settipane (the only person I knew when I moved to Chicago) took me to my very first Chicago Festival, which just so happened to be the Blues Fest.  The sky was crying that day (turns out, it isn't really Blues Fest unless it's raining) and the blues bug bit me hard.  I absolutely loved the music I was hearing.  I had heard about blues (when we talked about jazz and the blues scale in theory class) but I didn't realize that the blues sound could be so FUN.  

I couldn't tell you who performed on that Sunday in 1992, but they were awesome.  I would have given anything to be on that stage, and I only wished that I had gotten there earlier so I could take in more of that fabulous music.  I made a decision on the spot that I wasn't going to miss any of the upcoming music festivals in Chicago, and I was right there for the Taste of Chicago, and Jazz Fest later that summer.  The music was amazing, and I couldn't believe that it was all absolutely free of charge.  What a great city!

If I'm ever going to really "get" jazz, I'm going to need to get some help. 

I began to regret that I had disregarded jazz so categorically in college.  I wished like heck that I had my K-State sax professor (Dr. C.) in Chicago so I could take more private lessons, or get some tips on how to improvise or read "charts".

Then I had an epiphany.  Why not take lessons from someone in the city?  I didn't know where to begin to find a good instructor, but I suspected that anyone who was a professor was probably better than me!  I didn't have a lot of money, and the big universities in the downtown area (Loyola, Northwestern, DePaul, U of C) were pricey, so I looked into enrolling at Harold Washington College, a community college that was 2 blocks from my office.

I signed up to take one credit worth of saxophone lessons at HWC.  It was an eye-opening experience for me.   As an inner city community college, let's just say that it was VERY DIFFERENT from Kansas State.   Little mid-western me, dressed for work in my business suits pretty much stuck out like from the under-privledged, largely minority, obviously disadvantaged .  .   

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