The Old Man With The Saxophone
Thanks for the Inspiration, Rich.
You always hear people talk about the things they’d do if they just had more time. Read more books, watch more movies, visit their family more often, write more. Things like that.
Learning to play an instrument always seems to come up in those conversations. In December of last year, I saw someone who was making good on that impulse, and it was pretty inspiring.
I’d ventured into Brooklyn to hang out with an old friend, who like a lot of friends in this digital age, I speak to often but rarely see. Our nightly adventures somehow brought us to Park Slope for coffee at Tea Lounge, which I’d never been to.
We were there for perhaps 30 minutes when one of the bartenders came over to tell us that the area we were sitting in was going to be cleared out in 15 minutes. They had to set up that section for open mic night. Fuck.
I hadn’t been to an open mic in a fairly long time, and because I basically started my music career with a group of friends organizing a local open mic night, I’ve something of an aversion to them. Open mics remind me too much of things I’ve left behind.
The prospect of staying for this one didn’t seem high on my list of things to do at that moment, but after talking to a dude who was going to be playing I felt like maybe I’d stick around. It was the holiday season and I really didn’t have much to do. Maybe I’d see something good?
Little did I know the real highlight of the show wasn’t going to be this kid who was chatting me up. Instead, it was going to be Rich, the second performer of the evening. Rich was an older gentleman— he had to be in his late 60s — and he ambled on stage with a saxophone strapped around his neck.
Usually at open mics you get guitar players and poets and comedians. Occasionally someone has a keyboard. Only in rare instances does someone have something outside of that repertoire.
The sax made my eyes widen. Played properly, like any instrument, it’s incredibly expressive and beautiful.
I’ve had the great fortune to work with a few saxophone players and have flirted with buying a sax from time to time. My uncle Peter plays sax. When I was a kid and I tried to get into the school band, the instrument I told them I wanted to play was— you guessed it— the saxophone.
Any time someone is playing sax on the street I have to stop for a few minutes. The first time I went to SXSW, back in 2010, I left a pretty exciting ‘event’— one of those things where people stand around drinking free alcohol and pretending to care about whoever is on stage— and stood by idly watching a guy playing sax on a corner for at least an hour. That wound up being the highlight of the trip.
So, Rich gets on stage and he seems a little nervous. I thought it was just an age thing. But given his age I thought Rich might have been a seasoned sax player who was just here because that’s sometimes how life works out for musicians. You see guys in the train station all the time, seemingly anonymous, who have in some cases toured all over the world. The hard life of a musician is often thankless like that.
Rich placed some sheet music on a music stand in front of him and nervously fiddled with the pages. He was jittery, jumbling words and stuttering a bit.
He told the crowd that he wasn’t used to being on stage this early in the evening, that he would usually go on much later. He said this almost in a way where it seemed like he wasn’t in on the reality that the organizers of the open mic might stick him at the end because they think he’s either not good or because they don’t want some old guy messing up their vibe.
Open mic night people are dicks like that.
But anyway, Rich adjusted the music stand to a sensible height so that he could see it, then it promptly fell back down. He couldn’t fix it so he just left it down there.
Then he told a story about how before Dick Clark’s presence became a staple at New Year’s Eve celebrations, Guy Lombardo held sway. That every New Year’s Eve, Lombardo would have his band the Royal Canadians play “Auld Lang Syne” after the ball dropped— that’s how it became a tradition— and so to mark the occasion he would play it.
And then he started playing.
I want to say that Rich blew me away with the way he played but honestly he didn’t. He wasn’t great. He wasn’t bad. He hit all the right notes. He read the sheet music and played it the way it was written.
The fact that he was reading sheet music at all should have given it away to me.
Rich wasn’t a seasoned saxophone player. Rich was just learning the sax. He was a novice. A rookie.
Rich moved on to his next piece, the saxophone solo from Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man.”
Again he hit what sounded like all the right notes, but then again this was a jazz piece and in jazz improvisation is everything. Still, he was reading off the page and you could tell he was just trying to get through the transcription.
Two songs down and his set was over.
People clapped, he thanked them for their time, then he grabbed his music sheets and made a beeline to the back of the venue. It was short and sweet.
The host for the evening got back on the microphone and said that it’s hard for people to get on stage and do what they do. He was right. It is.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Rich, though.
I looked to the back of the venue a few times to see if he was still there but it seemed he’d left just as quick as he came. Another performer was now on— a comedian, who was not extremely funny— and I was thinking about what it meant for someone like Rich to get up in front of all these people and play.
He’s not a young kid with dreams of making it big. He’s not trying to be America’s next top whatever the fuck. The guy was just trying to take something that he might have spent his whole life wishing he could do, and put it out into the universe. Whoever heard it, heard it.
There was something so pure about it. So honest.
I looked back to the room one last time, and to my delight, there he was. I got up and walked over to him.
“How long have you been playing?” I asked.
“Two years,” he replied.
“What made you start playing? Was the saxophone something you just always wanted to learn?” I asked.
“Retirement,” he said. “Not wanting to be alone. This gives me something to do, makes me get out there. There’s more to life than spectating. I didn’t want to just sit and watch. I didn’t want to spectate anymore. I wanted to participate.”
He told me about how the organizers usually put him on late, after the crowd has thinned and there aren’t many people left. But he plays anyway, just glad that someone is listening.
He told me about other open mics he goes to, how he tries to make sure he always has a message when he performs— sometimes he’ll recite a poem or something before he plays— so that even if his playing isn’t awesome, people can get something out of it.
He said he took a lesson every week, and I told him that I too take music lessons, because at the time, I did. In a weird way we were kindred spirits, standing there.
Just then, a young twenty-something-year-old girl walked past us.
“You were awesome!” she said.
He smiled at her, then looked over at me.
“That felt good,” he said.
Then he had to go home. I told him I hoped to see him again there, and he said the same about me, and he hurried out the door.
I looked at my watch. It was 9:58 PM. It was like he had a curfew or something. Amazing.
I went back to watching the performers. None of them were spectacular. Even Rich wasn’t spectacular. But the idea of this guy getting up there and playing for us, it was really inspiring.
Rich made me think of my own life, nights I’ve spent alone by myself, staring at a piece of sheet music into the early hours of the morning, just trying to nail a certain part. Of sitting in piano lessons while everyone else is out doing amazing things or whatever it is people do with themselves these days. Of the pure joy the act of playing music can bring to a person and how it’s never too late to learn how to do that.
I thought about how rewarding it might have been for that girl to come up to Richard and give him that compliment and how maybe me talking to him was the icebreaker that allowed her to do that.
Because really, nobody was saying anything to the guy before then.
He was alone. By himself. Just standing there.
He did what he came to do and was prepared to go home. And though I doubt he needed it, maybe our conversation gave him a little more courage to keep going. Maybe I needed our conversation so I could keep going.
Thank you, Rich. Thank you, old man with the saxophone.
