oh play that thing

Somehow I’d managed to convince myself that the capacity to learn to play a musical instrument was directly proportional to the amount of time spent listening to it in the hands of experts. Forty plus years of absorption should surely at least give me a good head start. I was about to become a musical opsimath.

By steady attrition, I eventually selected the alto saxophone as my intended instrument. The tenor is a lot heavier to lug around and I’d read somewhere that the soprano’s fingering is more difficult to conquer, so the alto seemed a promising compromise.

For the first few weeks I appeared to be progressing well. I wanted to play “Ornithology” but my music teacher insisted I practise scales. Within a couple of months, I’d more or less mastered the key of C and could play the first few bars of “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” Then a musician friend lent me a microphone and suggested I record myself as an aid to improving technique.

That was a mistake. The lowing and mooing from the tape deck was nothing like the mellifluous sounds I heard in my head. So I started to work on improving my tone. I changed reeds, bought metal mouthpieces, cleaned the horn from time to time, puckered my lips a little more than was natural and thought Paul Desmond. Still I sounded like a lovelorn stag arriving too late for the rut.

But I persevered. I acquired a couple more scales, played along with Dexter Gordon on my favourite version of “Lullaby of Birdland” and generally drove my neighbours to the verge of suicide. At the time we lived on a farm and the neighbours were a barn full of cows – that’s a measure of how bad I was.

After about 18 months, a new music teacher expressed concern that I couldn’t play “God Save the Queen” by ear, I was incapable of improvising on “Three Blind Mice” and his neighbours were now beginning to complain about the noise on Saturday mornings. To add to my distress, a fellow pupil, a young girl who had been learning for about six months, was actually playing in an amateur swing band and was already romping through “Seventy-six Trombones” at a fair lick.

The final nail in my musical coffin was when I flicked open a biography of Ronnie Scott and read that Pete King was playing professionally in clubs within two years of picking up a saxophone for the first time. After two years, I managed a faltering “Auld Lang Syne” at a friend’s Old Year’s Night trosh and still sounded worse than the ships in the Wash at midnight. What should have been inspiration proved to be a deterrent. I admitted defeat. I sold the saxophone on e-bay.

I’ve now bought a penny whistle; I’m rubbish on that too. I’m going to try the kazoo next. It worked for Red McKenzie. What I don’t understand is this: how can anyone love jazz the way I do and be such a total failure at trying to play the stuff?