The very thought of you – Jesse Davis
Uploaded by boberwig. – Explore more music videos.

When the spoiler in inserted this piece doubles in volume and brightness.  I use to own one of these about 7-8 years ago and I played it with the spoiler in all the time for all sorts of gigs.  This was a great piece to go to for those loud R@B gigs where you had to cut through but it sounded just as good on the laid back jazz sets.  Although I prefer a link type mouthpiece now,  I like that you can get bright and loud with the ESP but it’s sound remains very fat!  It doesn’t get thin at all.   I recorded two clips with this mouthpiece.  One is with the spoiler in and the second one is without the spoiler.  You can hear the difference for yourself.  Let me know what you think.

ESP with Spoiler

ESP without Spoiler

Joe Allard (December 31, 1910 – May 3, 1991), a native of Lowell, MA,was a famous saxophone and clarinet  professor at Juilliard, The New England Conservatory and The Manhattan School of Music.  Some of his most famous students were: Michael Brecker, Eddie Daniels, Bob Berg, Dave Liebman, Paul Winter, Steve Grossman, Kenneth Radnofsky, Bill Pierce  and many many others.

I found reading this both fascinating and enlightening.  Many of the tips on reeds I had never heard before. I love how relaxed it all feels when you’re reading it.  The more relaxed and natural everything is the better.  Thanks so much to Gary Jones for writing this out and making it available to the saxophone community!

Lesson 1

first thing is to do this exercise for a week with just a reed. no mouthpiece no horn.

holding the end of the reed in your hand, place the reed on your lower lip like you are going to play it. just let it rest there. relax your mouth totally. no tension in you lip at all.
your lip is straight across and slightly turned over the top of your lower teeth.
no downward tension on the reed, it just lays there. the only tension is the weight of the reed.
reeds aren’t very heavy.
your lower lip goes right aginst your teeth with your lip as an uninvolved cushion between reed and teeth.
mouth sort of open like you have an invisible mouthpiece in there.
now practice blowing over the reed like that. just like you are playing the reed on an invisible mouthpiece.
you just use your lungs to push air but don’t involve any of the muscles in your mouth or face.
when you blow over the reed your lip and mouth don’t respond in any way.
the most important thing is that your lower lip doesn’t respond by curving around the sides of the reed in any way.
no clamping down on the mouthpiece, there isn’t any mouthpiece there to clamp down on.
your bottom lip is completely relaxed like you are asleep.
practice blowing like that.
this is what it should feel like to blow the saxophone.
keep a reed in you pocket and do it alot.
the other thing from the first lesson was breathing exercises.
we were in an urban environment where we walked alot but you could just as easily do this  sitting down.
when you are walking breath in through your nose for 5 steps. hold your breath for 5 steps. breath out through your mouth for 5 steps.
eventually work your way up to 20 steps in, 20 steps hold, 20 steps out. eventually you might like to do some empty counts after the exhale and before the next inhalatin.
as the air goes out you can restrict and controll the flow like a flute embouchure. the exhalation is an even steady long tone.
if you practice this while stationary just pace your breathing by counting like a walking pace.
this is to develop good breathing but also for relaxation both mental and physical.
You can’t play music if your head is full of mental chatter.
later for added layers of concentration you can count repetitions. you could for instance do 3 groups of 12 different 20 count cycles or whatever like that.
this would corespond to the multiple layers of concentration needed to keep track of complex jazz forms.
one of the things we are trying to do is union of mind and body. you hear or think a sound and it comes out of the horn.
just like speaking. the breathing exercises are yoga exercises. yoga means union.
eventually the head space the breathing exercise puts you in starts to become a mental state you learn and can use when you play.
In keeping with this theme there was a hatha yoga pose to practice that first lesson.
much to my suprise i was instructed to get on my back on the floor in the practice studio and do the sivananda  yoga posture Setubandasana  “the bridge” or “bridge-building pose”. (bridge the gap between body and mind)
picture:

Its basically about opening up and stretching your lower abdomen.
concentrate on how you are breathing when you do this.
learn to breath in deeply by drawing your diaphram down.
only at the end of your inhalation is there a need to expand the chest.
its important to do the exercises but also to understand the reason why you are doing them.
at the end of this lesson George told me to get the book “top tones for saxophone” by Sigurd Rascher
and to get a single bevel reed knife.

Lesson 2

ok, so now that we have the proper embouchure it’s time to put the reed on a mouthpiece.
First we have to prepare the reed.
this is going to be hard to describe so i made pictures and you should ask questions.
the purpose of this is to get the reed to seal properly.
Soak a new reed in a glass or bowl of fresh water for 15 minutes and then lay it out on a mantle or table somewhere upside down to dry.
after it dries lay it upside down on your left index finger. It might help to wet your finger so the reed will stick.
hold the reed knife in your right hand and put it on the reed near the bottom. put your left thumb behind the knife blade for support.
with a counter clockwise twist of you right wrist and with you thumb for guidance and support for the blade, work the table of the reed until it is flat.
your thumb and index finger work together to control the pressure on the reed. you have to keep the knife pressure even left to right and the motion is scraping not cutting.
this takes some practice.
picture:

you want to flatten about the first two inches of the reed (tenor reed). the most important part is about half way up where the mouthpiece table ends and the mouthpiece window begins.
you want the whole area of the reed on the mouthpiece table to be flat and not warped or curved.
you  know the reed is  flat when the material comes off the reed evenly all the way across.
material will come off only the high points at first.
after you get the reed flat get a clean piece of high quality paper and put it on a perfectly clean flat hard surface.
place the reed on the paper flat side down. put the tips of your  first 3 fingers along the center back of the reed.
rub the reed counter clockwise in a circle 100 times to polish and seal the flat side of the reed.
picture:

now rub you finger or thumb along the top, cut  side of the reed  from the vamp to the tip to seal the top. rub allot like 100 times.
you are trying to seal off all the open pores on the top.
this will seal the reed and make it into a solid object. a freshly cut piece of cane like all plant stems is a series of tubes.
these tubes conduct air and water so an unsealed reed can’t seal on the mouthpiece properly.
at the end of your playing session you can check the seal on the flat side of the reed.
take the reed off of the mouthpiece carefully and look at the reed and mouthpiece.
The reed should have a sharp line where the area above the mouthpiece window is wet and the fibers might be swollen.
below that, the area of the reed on the mouthpiece table should be perfectly dry. the table of the mouthpiece should be perfectly dry.
picture:

you can if you want also shape the tip of the reed to fit the mouthpiece tip exactly. this will help the seal as the reed vibrates.
line the reed up to the tip but below it so you can see what it needs. take the reed off the mouthpiece and hold a piece of very fine wet or dry sandpaper in your left hand.
you can get a little stiffness out of the sand paper if you need to by making a little bit of a curve with it as you hold it in the air. don’t put the sandpaper against something just hold it out in the air.
now rub the tip of the reed against the sandpaper side to side (in a line edge to edge). don’t put any stress on the reed tip. shape the reed tip to match the mouthpiece tip.
picture:

When you put the reed on the mouthpiece line it up so a little sliver of the mouthpiece tip rail is showing above the reed.
In the actual  lessons we started with vandoren #5 reeds and cut them down to proper strength but that’s too extensive to describe here and i was never good enough at it to fully understand what was going on.

Lesson 3
OK now that we have a reed on the mouthpiece lets play.
for this week play only the mouthpiece without the horn.
before you put the mouthpiece in your mouth.
close your mouth and relax as much as possible.
feel how your tongue is against the roof of your mouth and the sides of your tongue are against your upper teeth.
now open your mouth a little and let your tongue fall down so it cuts your mouth cavity in half.
spread your tongue out so it covers your upper teeth on both sides at least partly and seals against you teeth.
this does not apply to the front teeth, the tip of your tongue pulls back a little and will direct the air in between the reed and mouthpiece tip.
also your tongue is positioned perfectly for tonguing.
hold your hand up to your mouth and blow against it to feel how the air travels above your tongue.
the air travels faster because you have reduced your mouth volume by half.
don’t put tension in you tongue when you do this. you can do it and still be perfectly relaxed.
now put the mouthpiece in your mouth and remember the feel from the first week of playing with only the reed.
the upper teeth rest directly on the mouthpiece without any biting or pressure.
when you play air should be leaking out of the corners of you mouth because your lower lip is straight across and not curving up the sides of the reed.
eventually some of your upper lip might come down and fill the gap and stop the leaking but the leaking is not a concern.
use the leaking as a sign you are doing it correctly.
the reason why this is a good thing is if your lip touches the side of the reed it would kill the free vibrations of the reed.
your lower lip acts only as a fulcrum point for the reed to vibrate from. your lip shouldn’t dampen the reeds free vibrations in any way.

ok now here is the real good stuff.
practice singing  a note or an interval or series of notes.
think about how you body automatically adjusts itself to make the different notes when you are singing.
this is the same mechanism you are going to use to play the different notes on the mouthpiece.
never change your mouth position in any way and keep your mouth perfectly relaxed and use the way you sing with you vocal cords to
practice on the mouthpiece. play scales, play songs, whatever.
what you need to do is imagine each note fully before you play it.
take the mouthpiece out of you mouth and sing what you want to play.
then imagine the same sounds as they are going to come out of the mouthpiece reed combination.
then play what you imagined on the mouthpiece.
when you are playing one note and you want to change to another note develop a mental image of the new note before you try to play it.
the mental image should include pitch, tone, and volume.

now you get to play the horn.
stand up straight and imagine that you are hanging from a string that is attached to the top of your head and and to the ceiling.
then use the neckstrap to bring the horn to your mouth. find just the proper adjustment for the neckstrap.
you will be surprised how much proper posture effects tone, just like when you are talking.
don’t hold your head too high or too low. image you are relaxed and speaking to someone in a direct and honest way.
that’s how it should feel when you play, like you are standing and talking.
now when you put your hands on the horn curve your fingers and put the tips of you fingers directly on the pearls.
don’t hold your fingers flat like you see so many players do.
the tips of your fingers should never lift off of the keys accept when you need to use side keys or whatever.
To get a feel for this and train yourself about the way it feels you can put a little piece of double sided tape on the pearls so your fingers stick to the keys.
think about the amount of energy that goes into pushing down the keys. never squeeze hard on the keys only push them closed
only with the smallest amount of energy needed to overcome the springs and make the key go down.
sing a note and squeeze something or push hard on a flat surface with just one finger and you can hear the tone of your voice change.
never lift your fingers, you never have to actively lift your fingers just withdraw the energy used to overcome the spring and let the key springs raise you fingers up
as the keys open by themselves, get a feel for this because it’s a very powerful concept.
you don’t lift your fingers you just stop pushing down and the springs raise your fingers for you.

Now on to the book “Top Tones for Saxophone” by Sigurd Rascher.
The main goal of this book is tone and intonation development, the secondary goal is extended range into the 3rd and even 4th octave of the horn.
you have to work on these exercises some every day and the progress will most likely be rather slow at first.
the first set of exercises on pg 6 are long tone exercises. They are all important and well documented in the book.
outside of the instructions was the lesson to do the long tones soft to loud to soft.
this is the most important for developing intonation. you should do this some each day.
when you get to the loud part in the middle of the long tone really let the tone open up and get huge but not blasting.
The main idea here is pitch. you might want to use a tuner. The pitch as you crescendo and decrescendo needs to stay perfectly steady.
skip the exercises on pg 7 about uniformity of tone, because we don’t agree with the use of pressure on the reed as presented in the exercise.
then the page 8 and 9 exercises on tone imagination and ear training are very important and should be done some each day.
for instance you can do one line on page 9 very carefully each day and the next day start on the next line in a continual rotation.
Now comes the all important overtone exercises pg 12 – 18. again just take a section each day to work on.
when you do the overtone exercises it is very important not to adjust your embouchure in any way.
you play the overtone exercises perfectly smooth with no breaks between notes and no articulation and no adjustments to your jaw or lips.
If you use cheats like tonguing or embouchure movement then you are defeating the purpose.
the point is to develop the vocal way of controlling the tones like you practiced on the mouthpiece.
don’t worry about how these turn out at first just try honestly to do them and let it go.
The end result will be you can easily present the overtone within the tone of the low note and then take away the lower tone and isolate the overtone smoothly just like you are singing.
It will also be possible in the end to do the exercises as multiphonics simply adding the higher notes to the lower ones and keeping the lower notes going or taking away the lower notes as you like..
the purpose in doing this is to be able to control tone  color like you can with your voice.
tone color on the saxophone is a matter of adding or bringing out certain partials in the sound and lowering or decreasing others at will.
eventually this will be accomplished by simply imagining the tone you are going for.
its important to never play a note on the saxophone without first imagining the note in every aspect, tone, pitch and volume first.
It is this very act of imagining the note that will bring your body on board with the mechanisms to produce the tone.
eventually this will lead to the mind body connection we talked about earlier where you simply have to imagine music and your body will automatically create the music for you
without you having to think about it. the saxophone will eventually become just an extension of your body and therefore an extension of you mind.
just like the long tones the instruction, different from the book, was to also do the long tones with all manner of crescendos and decrescendos.
you will find over time it is easier for instance to crescendo into a downward overtone movement and decrescendo into an upward overtone interval.
you should also practice doing the opposite changing notes downward and the very softest point in a decrescendo and changing notes upward and the very apex of a crescendo.
these crescendo decrescendo exercises added to the overtone exercises will really help turbocharge the chop building aspect of the overtone exercises.
one more point is that the overtone exercises in the book only use the low note fingerings because all notes on the saxophone are extensions of these few lower fingerings.
there is never any need to do overtones on higher fingerings. it would be possible to play any music using only the few low note fingering say up to about D.
It might even be a fun exercise to try to play some music using overtones and only the low note fingerings.

i think that’s about it. if you follow this basic style you should consider yourself a joe allard school saxophone player.

For the last 5 years things have gone pretty smoothly.  Normal life stuff. Nothing to write a blog about.  I’m happy about that!  I don’t know the why behind all the things in this story and I doubt I ever will but part of me thinks this last story was  so very important to me and my journey.  You see as you could probably tell as I told the story, I was growing increasingly more and more negative.  Many times I doubted if God existed .  Other times I thought “Well if he does exist, he’s kind of a jerk”.  Other times I thought “Well if he does exist, he could care less about me”.   For me this last act was huge.  I know many of you who are reading this might be thinking it was just a coincidence and God had nothing to do with it.  I just happened to pray that prayer the night before my hearing was to return to normal.  Believe me, many times I have even thought that myself.  But I keep coming back to that prayer that I said.  I laid it all out like I never had before.  I told him that if I were to see him work immediately then there would be no question in my mind.  He did exist and he does care about me. He is involved in my life and working and moving.  The next morning, I woke up and was cured.  You might think it was a coincidence but I like to believe it was something else.

Since that time in 2005 life has been good.  My girls are getting bigger everyday.  I’ve had many fun and happy times with them. More than I can count.  I’ve had great times with my wife who is my best friend. We bought a house that we all love and feel lucky to live in.  I feel very grateful.  Very grateful.

I had someone ask me once if I had any regrets?  Would I go back and change something from my past if I had the power to do so?  Without even thinking about it I said “No”. I wouldn’t change a thing. Brain tumor,cancer,bacterial meningitis,TEN,headaches,shunt even depression.  Those things have all worked to make me who I am today.  They have all brought me to to this place.  It feels good to be here.  I don’t want to leave this place.  I’m afraid that if I were to change one thing in the past then that would change where I am and who I am right now.  I like this place. No thanks. I’ll stay right here.

I’m not sure what the future holds.  I’m not sure if I’m out of the woods yet.  I pray daily that none of my girls take after me with health issues.  That’s my biggest fear.  Every time one of them says they have a headache I get scared.  I’m hopeful though. It’s out of my hands.  There is nothing I can do. About me and my future or about them and their futures. All we can do is the best that we can and at a certain point we all come to a point where we are to weak to handle things ourselves.  Some people never get to that point until they are lying on their deathbed.  Some people have too many of those moments through out their lives.  I do believe that if we can look at those moments with the right perspective we can learn a lot about ourselves and the people around us.  There were many times during this story that I thought I was cursed.  Now as I write this story out, I have a different view, maybe I am one of the luckiest people on earth.  I think it’s matter of perspective.

Like I wrote earlier in the story, I’m writing this to those of you out there that will read it and get something out of it.  I’m not even sure what you will get out of it and I  have already received many emails from people who were touched, moved or inspired in ways that I had not anticipated.     I do pray for those of you out there that are in a dark place.  I’ve been there and know how how sad and lonely it can be.  I pray and hope that you can and will come out the other side and end up in a place that is good to be in.  A place that you yourselves don’t want to leave.   Take Care,    Steve

Steve & Brenda with Sarah,Melissa, Jillian and dog Tucker

Between 2002-2005 life went on.  Brenda and I had another child, Melissa and we were enjoying life up in NH. I had built up my private teaching to about 60-70 students a week and was playing in a great band every weekend. Things were going pretty good but there was one thing that was plaguing me and that was those damn headaches.  If you remember back to earlier in the story I told you about my headaches after the brain tumor surgery. They would come about once a week and totally wipe me out.  Nothing would get rid of them that I had tried.  All I could do was take Tylenol PM, fall asleep and 6 hours later they were usually gone.

Well during 2002-2005 the headaches increased.  They  happened more often and they became even more painful.  I am not exaggerating when I say that in 2003-2005 I think I had a headache about 98% of the time.  Sometimes it would only be slight but many other times I would be gripping my head and unable to handle it.  I remember countless times that I took my girls to the park.  They would be playing on the slides and swings and yelling for me to come join them and I would just be sitting on the bench holding my head.  As the headaches got worse so did my personality.  I  always tried to be nice and loving but I remember so many times where I would just snap and yell at the girls. Not because of anything they did but just because of the pain I was feeling.

Finally, I couldn’t manage anymore.  It was getting to the point where I couldn’t go to gigs or teach because  and was starting to call in sick. (One of the worst jobs is being a music teacher when you have a migraine…..Trust me! )  I went to my new doctor in NH and he  really had no answers for me. He ran a bunch of tests but was at a loss. He prescribed  me “Vicodin” for the times when it was really bad.  Now I went home and tried the Vicodin and have to say that it was my new best friend.  I would be in total intense pain and then take a Vicodin and the pain would just melt away.  I would feel completely happy.  Now before I continue you can probably see where this is going to go.  I mean the thing is, I had these headaches all the time so……….I started taking Vicodin all the time!  I’d go back and get more, and then go back and get more and pretty soon instead of it lasting a month, it would be gone in two weeks. Finally, my doctor said he couldn’t give me anymore. I was pretty upset. I could finally function. Go to work, play gigs, teach, play with my kids and go out with my wife. All I had to do was take a couple of pills and the pain would go away and now he was taking that away!  What would I do now?  How would I function?

I went home that day feeling pretty sad. (Don’t worry, I wasn’t depressed like before) The headaches came back and I just went on trying to live with them (not to mention coming off of Vicodin cold turkey which wasn’t that great either)

A few weeks later I went to see my doctor and this time I was adamant that we needed to figure this out because there was no way I could continue to live like this.  I have to say that of all the things that I had went through up to this point,  nothing compared to a chronic illness.  The worst feeling in the world is to have something that is chronic and have no cure nor any idea what it is caused from or how to fix it.  I have the most respect for those of you out there that struggle with a chronic illness.  I understand how hard it can be!

The doctor was making appointments with some specialist and on a whim I asked if I could see and eye doctor because the headaches seemed like they were always centered around my right eye. He made an appointment for me down at Mass Eye and Ear with a Nuero-Opthamologist to check out my eyes which as luck would have it was the best thing I ever did.  I went down to my appointment and the doctor checked my eyes after I told him about my headaches.  Within seconds after checking my right eye he told me that I needed to have a shunt put in my head to drain pressure from my head.  It turned out that my right eye’s optic nerve had extreme swelling and he knew immediately that there was too much intracranial pressure in my head. He scheduled a spinal tap and sure enough my pressure was very high. The doctor didn’t know why or what was causing it but he said the important thing is to get the shunt in place to decease that pressure ASAP.

A few days later, I went in for the surgery and they put the shunt in.  It would drain any excess fluid in my brain down to my abdomen whenever the pressure would reach a certain point. I had to go back for a few adjustment but once it was set right………my headaches were totally gone.  Now you have to understand that going from having severe headaches 98% of the time to none is like being releases from jail after 20 years.  I was free!  I was smiling, I had more energy than ever.  Right after this time is when I started my website, wrote all my books and started practicing again. From 2002 -2005 I couldn’t do much of anything because of these headaches but after the shunt the floodgates were opened.

One final story before I end this. A few weeks after the shunt was finally set up I woke up one morning and my youngest daughter came up to my bed and said “Good Morning Daddy” I looked at her funny because  to be honest, she sounded demon possessed.  I had heard two voices when she spoke.  Her normal voice and then another voice at the same time that was lower.  It actually freaked me out a bit.  I went downstair and sat at the table eating breakfast and all the girls voices sounded messed up.  I heard two voices every time they spoke.  Now this was alarming and weird but what happened next really scared me.  My wife put on some music and it sounded like garbage.  I mean it was the worst music I had ever heard.  I told her how bad it was and how out of tune the musicians were and she thought I was crazy. A little later I went to play my sax and that too sounded messed up.  I thought me sax was broke.  I played a G Major scale and half way up the scale the notes were incredibly flat.  I played a C major triad on my piano and it sounded horrible also.  All out of tune and like some dissonant chord from hell.  I truly flipped out at this point and went down to Mass Eye and Ear emergency room that night.  They had no answers for me but left me with………”Let’s see if it goes away”  You’ve got be kidding me I thought. I’m a professional musician and I can’t even listen to music.  As luck would have it the next day we were going to Disney World so I had no gigs for the next 2 weeks.

The next day my family and I went to Disney World in Florida.  The happiest place on earth and I was a total wreck.  For the 10 days we were there my hearing never got better.  My wife just kept telling me to let it go but of course it was hard to do that.  Finally the next to last day there I had to leave dinner because of a bad headache.  It was so bad that I was nauseous and had to go back to the hotel room.  Back in the hotel room I had a long talk with God.  I had learned over the past years to express my feeling and be real and I felt like I did that in prayer that night.  I was scared, mad and quite bewildred at what God was now putting me through.  After all I had been through……….my headaches were finally cured, I could now enjoy life and be somewhat happy and  now you take away my hearing so I can’t be a musician!

Now at the end of this prayer this is what I said “God, I’m going to try to have faith here and I believe you can heal me. I know you have always worked in my life through doctors and hospitals and I am glad you have.  I guess what I’m wondering is why you can’t just do a real miracle.  Why can’t I just pray for something and you answer my prayer.  Not with doctors, not with hospitals  but just you anwering my prayer so I know it is you and that you heard me and loved me enough to help.  I just ask that this one time you help me like I see that you did for people in the Bible.  I pray that you jut cure me so that I finally know that you really exist and I won’t doubt anymore.  Just this one time can’t you do that for me?”

I woke up the next morning and was surprised to find that I was still alive.  Not only was I alive but I actually felt better!  I think it was because I had finally slept that night.  For the next couple of days the doctors kept and eye on me to see how far the allergic reaction would progress but it looked like it had stopped and that I might be OK.  They released me a few days later and I went home.  I still had this feeling like something was around the corner and I wasn’t out of the woods yet.   When you have been through so many health issues you start to get a bit paranoid that every little bump,pain or weird thing is another deadly illness.  I drove my wife crazy with all of my concerns and questions during this time.

A couple of weeks later, I noticed that there were what seemed like large bumps in my neck that I had never noticed before. Another question to bother my wife with……. My wife took a look and she said that my lymph nodes were really swollen and enlarged.  We called my doctor and of course she gave me the advice she always did back then………”Go to the Mass General Emergency room”.  My doctors would always give me the line “Considering your medical history you should go to the emergency room………better to be safe than sorry.”

I went to the ER and to make a long story short, they admitted me into the hospital.  My next visit was from my old oncologist who was my doctor when I had testicular cancer.  He said that he was concerned that this might be a return of my cancer that had spread to my lymph nodes.  If you remember back to that part of my story, they were concerned that the cancer might spread to my lymph nodes about 4 years earlier.  I of course assumed the worse, and thought for sure that now I had cancer coursing through my entire body and would surely die!

But, I was wrong this time.  I didn’t have cancer thank goodness.  They did a number of tests and decided that this lymph node swelling was just another symptom that was lingering after my TEN (Toxic Epidermal Necrosis).  They let me go home and life continued for me.  My skin was a complete mess and I had to use a special cream on it everyday. It was always itching which drove me crazy.  Also, my wife said I was always complaining about the way my mouth tasted.  She said I was obsessed  with toothbrushes.  I would go out and buy a new toothbrush every couple of days and was convinced that if I found the right one and brushed enough the  weird taste in my mouth would go away.

Also, I have to tell you that something felt very wrong with me mentally.  By this point it was late December, early January of 2001.  What I’m going to share here isn’t easy for me but it’s part of the story none the less so you have to hear it.  I did  not feel right at all. After I got home from the hospital, I found I had very little energy.   I would have more trouble than usual waking up in the morning and would feel exhausted all day long.  Simple tasks like doing laundry or vacuuming  felt too tiring to do.  I found myself just crying for no reason what so ever.  I just felt this overwhelming sadness that seemed to be in me and I had no idea why or what to do about it.  Soon after this I started having odd thoughts. I would just be driving down the road and suddenly think about just yanking the steering wheel and running into another car coming my way.  If I was on a bridge I would think about just driving my car right off.  At first, these thoughts would just pop up out of nowhere but then they started coming more and more into my head.  When I took medication I would think about taking too much and going to sleep forever.  If I saw a movie with a gun I would imagine having a gun myself and imagine killing myself with the gun.  Now I know these are some alarming thoughts and some of you might feel uncomfortable reading about these things but those were the kinds of thoughts that were going through my head.

Now, before this time I had always thought of depression as something that happened to people who were weak and just couldn’t handle life. (I don’t think that anymore, I have read that it can be chemical and I believe that)  It was never something I would have a problem with because I was strong.  My wife helped me come to grips with the fact that no matter how hard I tried to deny it, I was in fact very depressed and that I should get help.  I can be quite prideful at times so for awhile I tried to fight that decision and work my way out of this state of mind by pure determination.  It didn’t work.  It just seemed like I was continuing to spiral down and down.  I wouldn’t call any of my friends, I hardly ever smiled, I wasn’t doing any housework, I wasn’t getting out of the house and trying to find more work as a musician. All those things seemed too hard to do and part of me just didn’t care.  I knew that I should care and I knew what I should be feeling and thinking but I just didn’t.  During the day I was tired and useless but at night I was a huge ball of anxiety.  I couldn’t sleep.  I remember going out for drives at midnight and feeling like I was having panic attacks.  I’d be up most of the night and then be even more tired the next day. My wife was 8-9 months pregnant and was about to give birth to our 2nd child while working 40 hours a week as a nurse.  I was home trying to take care of my 1 1/2 year old daughter and going out on gigs on the weekends.  This was a very stressful time for us.  I feel bad that I put my wife through that.

Finally, I decided to get help after Sarah was born.  I couldn’t keep putting it off. I went to see my doctor and we tried a few different medications.  I can’t remember the details but I seem to remember having a few adverse reactions to some of them.  Finally, I settled on one and took that for about 6 months.  During this time I saw a Psychologist who helped me out immensely.  We talked about all the things I had been through and all the feelings that I didn’t even know I was feeling.  I don’t know the bottom line to why I was feeling so depressed but as I went to those sessions and talked about things it was clear to me that I had some issues. I think my whole life I had always tried to do and feel what I thought was right.  If I felt mad or angry I would immediately squash those feelings down because they were bad feelings.  As I met with the doctor every week he would ask me questions about how things made me feel.  I shared about my whole medical history and after each part of the story he would ask me how that made me feel or how I felt towards others, myself and even God.  I would always answer with these pat nice answers that the doctor would always question. Finally when we got to the last episode of being in the hospital and breaking down he broke through my nice answers and I remember just sitting there crying and  feeling so mad and angry at God.  I knew that I had been angry but this moment revealed to me that I was still very angry. It also revealed  that I still thought God was out to get me, that I believed more bad things were coming and that no matter what I did I could not stop it or change that fact.  I still thought very strongly that I was cursed.  Obviously,  you can see how these thoughts would make someone quite depressed.

The other major breakthrough at this time is that the doctor had me read a book called “Feeling Good” by David D. Burns.  This book was amazing for me.  You can not even imagine how reading this book and talking to the doctor helped me change my life.  It was huge.  You see, up until this point in my life I had an “All or Nothing” mentality. I would always go to extremes with things.  If I was going to be a musician then I had to practice 8 hours a day.  If I only practiced 2 hours then I was a failure and would get depressed about it.  I would then use these depressed thought and sad feeling to motivate me to set more unobtainable goals that for awhile I would reach and then fail again.  My life was a cycle of this type of thinking. I was all about motivating myself with negative thinking.  I was also a  perfectionist.  Every single recording I made, I hated.  In 1993 I made a recording and as soon as I had it done I hated it and thought it wasn’t good enough.  I never did anything with it.  I’d practice and practice  and people would tell me I should make a recording and I would always think that I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t good enough.  I had this fear that if I thought I was ready or good enough then what would motivate me to practice.  Those were the negative thoughts that kept me working tirelessly all through high school, college, and adult life. I couldn’t let go of those thoughts.  That was my motivation.

Obviously, this book helped me to see the destructive thought processes I was having.  I still have the thought but now I recognize them and can work around them. For example, now on my website I have hundreds of sound clips of me playing the saxophone.  The old Steve would never have done that.  I would have listened to each on, thought it wasn’t good enough and discarded it.  Now I recognize those thoughts and I post the clips anyways deciding to overcome those thoughts.  Another example is my practice habits.  I’m still tempted to get down on myself if I don’t practice for  at least 4 hours but if I only practice for 1 hour that’s OK.  I can be happy with that.   It’s a matter of recognizing the thoughts and being able to get around them.   There’s more that improved but I can go more into that in another blog post.

Needless to say, a lot was revealed to me in these session and reading this book.  After about 6-8 months I slowly came out of this fog of depression.  The suicidal thoughts became less and less,  the overwhelming sadness lifted and I finally started smiling a bit more.  I actually had moments where I didn’t think God was out to get me and some new disease or tumor was around the corner.

You will notice that there is a donation link. You can download the solo without donating but I encourage any of you who are grateful to donate to Ben. Even if you can only donate a few bucks, I think it is important to acknowledge the work he has done here. Who knows maybe if we appreciate him enough he’ll transcribe another Chris Potter “monster solo” for us!  Thanks again Ben!

The first thing that struck me about this tenor mouthpiece is that it has a huge fat low end.  I’m talking lush here.  Every time I play the piece I go to that low end and want to play a nice lush tenor saxophone ballad.  The tone throughout the range of the saxophone is even and round sounding.  It’s actually a bit darker than what I sound like on almost every clip on this site but I’m really digging that out of this mouthpiece.  The last thing that strikes me about it is the playablity of it.  I know that sounds like a vague concept but certain mouthpieces connect to a player in a way that really allows them to express themselves more than on other pieces.  Even though I’ve only played this  mouthpiece for a short time I’ve already had some moments with it where I was playing things that I wouldn’t normally play.  It’s as if the mouthpiece is a fine tool that is letting me play better than other pieces I have played.  I’ve had a few of these pieces throughout the years that I’ve really connected with (most I still have sitting on my shelf)  Anyways, I want to thank Les again for selling me a great mouthpiece.  Let me know what you think……..seriously.   I listened to the clip a number of times and part of me thinks it might be too dark for my tastes but I’m curious what you all think.  Now I have to take it into battle against my other reigning florida link! Here’s a link to contact Erik.   Steve