Not With the Band
There was a physical therapist I met a few years ago when I was in the hospital. She was a very nice older middle-aged woman and we got along well from the start.
We got talking about our lives and it turned out she had been a dancer many years before. While she loved dancing, there were other things she wanted and wasn’t finding in her life. The lifestyle didn’t suit her and she moved into her current line of work helping folks like me learn to move our own bodies in better ways.
The thing I remember best about our brief acquaintance was a conversation that started out with a question I get asked frequently. It is an innocent question—but one filled with deeply rooted emotion for me.
The simple question was if I go out to ‘hear jazz’ anymore. My response, as always, was that I don’t play much saxophone these days, that I favor the piano, and that no - not really - I don’t go out to hear music much.
People’s’ response to my answer is usually one of surprise—or maybe a little embarrassment when they realize that I left a music career behind in a tactical decision—and perhaps that seemingly insignificant small talk of an ice breaker is just the opposite; and leaves me feeling defensive, nostalgic, and even a bit regretful all at the same time.
My friend the therapist surprised me. I went through my usual mental contortions of saying ‘no’ and trying to make this answer sound reasonable in such a way that most people would take my answer at face value and forget it. To my shock; she said something a kin to feeling the same way as I—having been a performer and left it behind, how difficult it was to go and see other people perform.
This might seem shallow at first - but imagine a relationship with something (or someone) that is so deep that your every breath is taken for it. All your dreams revolve around it. Everything you are, every friend you have, everywhere you’ve been, every victory and defeat - all involve this relationship. One day the relationship ends. You change. Your perceptions change. Your needs change. For one of a million reasons you just have to leave.
I sometimes look back on those years with a heavy heart - and though I know why I made the decisions I made - I don’t need to relive my twenties on a regular basis. In fact, it is painful to do so.
I still derive great pleasure from music. I bought a piano. I play it often. I’m constantly trying to work out new things to play. My listening tastes have expanded into new areas. The music is still in me. There is still a saxophone inside my head that gets played - so much so that on the rare occasions I do pick the instrument up, it is all still under my fingers. But this is all very private for me now.
There was a deep sense of belonging to something back then. This need to belong went way back to my earliest roots as a player in my teens. Maybe it is that camaraderie and the being ‘one of us-ness’ I miss. Maybe I feel like an outsider, just a patron, on the other side of the curtain with no back stage pass. It isn’t ‘us’ anymore and I cant say ‘I’m with the band’
