Woodshedding: A Life in the Key of C
It was already dark when I pulled up in front of the low-rent bungalow on the only mean street in La Jolla, Calif.
A guy had recently been shot there. I was nervous, but I wasn't afraid of bullets.
I was ready to start taking tenor saxophone lessons with a new teacher.
It was 1989 and I had started playing the sax a few years back when I lived in Kansas City. Yet I was still klutzy; the pure aesthetic of this instrument didn’t seem to fit; the sounds I produced were more tortured than true. At this stage, I couldn't get a gig with a kindergarten band.
I belonged in the woodshed.
Still, I wanted badly to be a musician, to speak the same language as my jazz heroes, John Coltrane and Dexter Gordon, and share in those same complex chord progressions, hit those soaring euphoric notes that seemed heaven-sent.
But I was learning a hard lesson: While appreciating jazz was the realm of the creative left brain; producing it was most definitely the domain of the more-utilitarian right side.
Music theory was math-based. And I was like a kid who wanted to be Carl Sagan, a gee-whiz astronomer in the making who couldn’t begin to fathom physics, the practical lingua franca to those glorious wonders of the nighttime sky.
My new teacher’s name was Joe Marillo. I’d found him through my musician-friend Fernando Romero, a Tijuana-born drummer and journalist who worked for the same local newspaper that I did.
At age 50, Joe was the real deal, an accomplished session player who performed in nightclubs throughout San Diego. His brother was a jazz drummer. He lived on Draper Avenue with two other musicians — his girlfriend, a classical pianist, and a bass player.
I knocked on the door, my tenor case in hand, my heart pounding. I had stage fright.
Joe answered, a small-framed man wearing blue jeans, no shirt and no socks. He was slurping down a bowl of pasta. The living room was dollhouse tiny, with an aging piano wedged against one wall.
Over the phone, I’d said I’d taken lessons for a few years, that I wanted to play jazz.
That evening, Joe closed the door behind me, sparing the small talk.
“Let’s hear you play,” he said.
I put the case on the floor, snapped open the cover and removed the smooth gold-colored Selmer from its felt bed. I donned the neck strap and stuck a fresh reed into my mouth, wetting it with my saliva. But I was so nervous my mouth was dry.
Joe sat on the piano bench, waiting.
I raised the instrument, put the mouthpiece to my lips, and began to blow.
I played two notes, maybe three.
“Stop,” Joe said.
And I think I heard him sigh.
My girlfriend had suggested the saxophone.
“All you do is drink,” she’d said. “You love the sax. Why don’t you learn to play?”
I was 29.
One day after I left work as a cop reporter for the Kansas City Star, I drove to a local music shop that was the size of a supermarket.
A young woman asked me what I wanted to play.
The sax, I said.
“Which kind?”
That stopped me. You mean, there was more than one?
She walked me through my choices and decided that with my six-foot-two-inch frame and big lungs, I could handle a tenor. It had that deeper range that I wanted.
I drove home, strapped on the instrument, lathered up a reed and stood in the mirror, admiring the look.
Then I tried to make a sound.
What came out was something tortured, like a goose being clubbed to death, or a blubbery seal in heat. A mistake.
My two cats raced out from under the bed, terrified, and I chased them down the hall, squawking and bleating.
It was my first concert.
I took lessons with a local teacher named Harold Steinhart, the brother of an editor at the paper. Harold was patient; he specialized in teaching kids. I paid him by check.
Then I moved to San Diego and met Joe, who was a different breed of cat.
I remember those one-on-one sessions through a prism of frustration.
We’d practice for 45 minutes every Tuesday night. Joe would sit at the piano and play as I worked through my assigned chord progressions.
I sucked.
I practiced though, I really did.
I played lessons from a songbook. I steeped myself in the milieu. I subscribed to Jazziz magazine and pored over technical how-to stories, as though trying to learn Greek.
I watched the film Round Midnight, and when Dexter Gordon said to a fellow player in one scene, “There’s nothing better than a wet Rico,” I got the joke. I was an insider.
In Kansas City, I’d had pictures taken with me and my tenor in front of the downtown skyline. Then the photographer said, “Now you gotta learn to play the thing.”
Being a student of the instrument became part of my identity. When I took a job in San Diego, I wrote a short bulletin board bio for my new colleagues that included a double-entendre that played off musician-speak.
At night, I wrote, I liked the turn the lights down low and choke the goose.
On weekends, I’d stick a towel into the bell of the sax to muffle the sound and work on breathing from my diaphragm; starting low and going high and then back to low.
I’d put on the Sonny Rollins album Freedom Suite and try to play along, hitting some notes, missing most. Those afternoons, being inside the music, were probably the most relaxed and rewarding and exhilarating moments I have ever felt.
I knew the joy of being a fledgling chef, serious about his craft, lost in his recipes, trying to conjure up a delicacy, but mostly just enjoying the process, loving the ride.
Sigh. Then came the lessons.
At the start of each practice session, Joe's stories of the gig life were music to my ears. Then came my playing, which was decidedly not.
One night, I confessed my frustrations. I told Joe that I felt mired in place, not improving, baffled by the succession of ever-complex fingering arrangements.
Joe understood.
“You’ve got time, John,” he said. “A few divorces, a couple of nervous breakdowns, then you’ll start to play.”
Ah, Joe.
He was a Stanley Kowalski-turned-maestro. He’d play beautifully on the piano and then lift his leg and fart, the wooden bench giving the flatulence resonance.
That was Joe at his best, when we talked about the culture of the music. The worst moments were when he became frustrated by my false notes and hesitation. He’d recite my instructions and then, if I didn’t grasp his point right away, he’d repeat the very same sentences — this time in a louder voice.
At the end came my favorite part. The lessons were $30 each and I’d most often give Joe two 20s, just so I could watch him in action.
Unlike the reserved Harold Steinhart back in Kansas City, Joe was all bohemian. He’d fumble inside his pockets, with crumpled dollar-bills dropping to the floor. He’d stooped to pick them up and then thrust his hand deeper to find the right change.
He never did. The transaction seemed somehow clandestine.
I’m gonna have to owe ya,” he’d say.
“That’s OK, Joe,” I’d answer. “No problem.”
It was during those moments I felt most like a legitimate player.
Like I belonged.
For all his roughness — or perhaps because of it — Joe became my mentor.
He encouraged me.
I hired him and his pickup band to play a backyard party at my house. Joe brought me up to play along on a few songs. I was nervous, but he whispered in my ear.
“Don’t worry, it’s the [most simple] key of C,” he said. “Just blow.”
And I did. I almost thought I’d fooled my guests. Maybe I was legit. But when I walked off the deck, my friend Denise sidled up and said, “Don’t quit your day job.”
Not on your life.
Not long after that, Joe and I drifted apart. I’d taken another job at a bigger newspaper and did a story about Joe and the other musicians — players like Charles McPherson and Jimmy McCasey — who lived on Draper Avenue, which had become La Jolla’s own Jazz Alley.
There were critics, who didn’t appreciate the music and the practicing. I quoted Joe talking about how his landlord complained if he didn’t close the windows.
“But I go ahead and play anyway,” he said. “I mean, with all the parties and the loud radios, this is nicer. This is jazz.”
The landlord saw the story and gave Joe a piece of her mind.
He called me, pissed. I had crossed the line from student protege to annoying reporter.
Our relationship was never the same.
With the stress of a new job, I stopped practicing as much.
Eventually, I quit playing altogether. I joked with my friends that my sax playing was like a cancer; it was in remission.
Years later, my father suddenly asked me about my playing.
“Why did you stop?” he asked.
I hemmed and hawed, about my career, about never having enough time.
And then he said words that wounded: “Just think how good you’d be today if you’d stuck with it.”
And while there were no guarantees, I got his point: I’d quit a satisfying vocation for the grind of careerism. As a musician, I wasn’t even any good, but still, I’d sold out.
But Joe kept playing, until he died in 2016, at age 83, of cancer.
To this day, I miss the freedom of the music on those Saturday afternoons when I could just play, alone, accompanying some cherished album. Having that instrument allowed me to rise from a spectator’s seat and take my place on a dark corner of the stage.
I also miss Joe, that hep-cat, blue-collar impresario who could never come up with the right change.
And while Joe might be gone, my Selmer still sits in a closet of my house in San Francisco.
Waiting for me to pop the clasps on its case, put the horn to my lips and just blow.
Because there is truly nothing better than a wet Rico.