I chose the Saxophone because it was the ‘80’s, and thanks to Sting, INXS and countless other 80’s bands, I was duped into believing that you could get girls if you played Saxophone. Sadly, while the decision remained awesome, its rationale was tragically flawed – but that’s another story for another day.
I joined the class mid-year and immediately started carrying an old, battered horn home every weekend so I could pretend I was practicing. What I was actually doing during that time was riding my bike – because I was 14, and that Raleigh wasn’t going to ride itself!
Not long after starting down the musical path, traditionally the exclusive domain of my musically gifted elder sibling, I distinctly remember getting ready to head out for school one morning in 1987, and my mother told my brother and me to wait a watch what was coming up on Good Morning America. We sighed impatiently, but I’m glad we waited, because the segment literally changed my life.
It was a Joel Siegel spotlight on Michael Brecker and Chick Corea – two monster jazz musicians who had each just released new projects – Brecker, his first solo effort, an eponymous LP that has since gone into jazz infamy as one of the best albums of a generation, and the debut of Chick Corea's Electric Band. The Corea album was good – but my brother was more the synth guy than I was
When Guns n’ Roses were really hitting their stride, I was listening in awe to Original Rays, and haunting dusty record shops for old Steps Ahead albums - completely missing the pop-music wave that high school was supposed to be. Likewise, when all my friends were worrying about who they were dating or not dating, I was out riding my bike and reading Mountain Bike Action magazines folded up inside my Economics textbook. Not great socially, but I didn’t care.
As the years went on, I made sure to be at the store the day every new Brecker album arrived, and listened to it non-stop for days. While I have yet to be able to actually play any of it, I can still anticipate every note of his monster solo in Itsbynne Reel, and every successive album further altered how I listened music.
So, if my life story ever mistakenly gets picked up by someone looking to tell a mundane tale of an average white male, the sad moments should be backdropped by one of Brecker’s emotive ballads; my triumphs by the hard-charging tsunami of sound that typify his best solos, above all, the “against all odds” moments told through every last perfect note on the Pilgrimage album – his last, and undeniably best performance ever recorded.
See, following a two-year struggle with MDS, Michael died on January 13, 2007, just 5 months after a brief period of remission allowed him to record the 9 best pieces of he ever wrote – from a sequestered hospital bed, for fear his immune system might not be able to handle any infections potentially introduced through a kiss from one of his children, or his wife’s touch.
As Herbie Hancock said in the short video created to document the album's recording: "He's taken something destructive, and made it become the impetus for something extremely constuctive." (watch the video - it's inspiring in itself.)
His death weighed heavily on me – like I’d lost a member of my family, and the album was released four months later. It blew me away, as well as other fans and critics alike – though Michael never got to hear the tunes himself in their final form.
It came out at a time was a time when I had started riding road a little more – finding longer, hillier routes to get to work in hopes of getting stronger and placing well at Spokane’s Tuesday night races. It was also at a time when tiny MP3 players made long rides on low-traffic roads a little more tolerable.
Without fail, Michael would accompany me on every one of those rides. On the good days, he’d light a fire in me – get me turning the pedals faster, like sonic EPO. But it was on the miserable days – when my legs felt like wet cement, or when the hills felt near-vertical and twice as long as they usually did – that he urged me on.
“If he could summon the energy through leukemia, partial-match stem cell transplants, and the poison that bought him the time and energy to be able to play like that, you can get up this fucking hill.” I’d shout at myself – sometimes out loud. And it worked every time.
I went on to have a reasonably good year at Tuesday Night Worlds that year, highlighted by a couple B-Class wins and a some key dig-deep moments inspired by a musical genius I never met, tragically never saw play live, but defined how I hear music, and made me re-think the word “difficult”.
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