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| Photo Credit: Andrew Thornton |
The first instrument I ever learned to play was saxophone. I remember vividly when the music directors from the middle and high schools came to my elementary school with some older students to show my 5th grade class the different band instruments that we had the option to learn if we choose to do so for the following year. I was immediately memorized when one of the high school students busted out their saxophone and started playing a jazzy riff. I had heard lots of saxophone before that by means of my parents record collections. But unlike the jazz records most budding musicians typically gravitate towards for inspiration, my knowledge of the instrument came more from a variety of pop or rock records I had been listening to since I could ever remember. The main riff to "
Maneater" by
Hall & Oates, the crazy solo in the bridge of "
Urgent" by
Foreigner,
Dick Parry's solo in 7/8 time during "
Money" by
Pink Floyd, and a plethora of other songs by the likes of
Traffic,
Supertramp, and
Huey Lewis were already ingrained into my musical psyche. I immediately started begging my parents to let me try out for the 6th grade band class. When we got to the tryouts I was told by one of the teachers that they typically did not allow first year students to play saxophone off the bat; most would start on clarinet and then work their way up because you had to have enough air to play saxophone. Luckily I had what it took, and after the tryout was given the instructions on where to procure a rental alto saxophone for the coming year. Lessons would start over the summer and I was told that it would take lots of practice, patience, and dedication to get good at the instrument. I remember going to the music store in Charlottesville weeks later and when the salesperson behind the counter opened the case to my new rental instrument, a
Bundy II Alto Saxophone by Selmer, it was as close to Christmas as you could get in the spring. The shiny brass gleamed in the florescent light, like tinsel on a tree. It was glorious. Before summer lessons started and I even knew where to place my fingers, I would ask my parents if I could just take it out of the case and hold it.
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| Picture from my favorite book at the time I was learning saxophone, "Mama Don't Allow" by Thacher Hurd |
Fast forward a few years and I had become fairly proficient on the instrument. I wasn't an all-star first chair, but I wasn't last chair either. My hobbies at that time were split between playing saxophone and playing baseball. I was admittedly not overly spectacular at either, but I could hold my own, and enjoyed the facets that came with each. As I moved through middle school I became more and more interested in learning guitar. My Aunt had leant me her classical guitar, which I infamously restrung with steel strings and totally messed the neck up, but I didn't care. I was too busy banging my head to all the new "
grunge" bands that were getting popular like
Nirvana,
Pearl Jam, and
Alice in Chains. Saxophone was still a focus at school, but outside of school, I wanted to be a rock star - and rock stars at that time didn't play saxophone...
High school came and I was still playing in the school band, which at Waynesboro High School meant spending the fall and early winter in marching band playing football games and the occasional parade, and then spring in concert band where we would focus on more traditional arrangements. If you were good enough, you could play in the jazz band, which was considered to be made up of the better players from the marching/concert band. I evidently wasn't part of that group and I had also quit playing baseball a year earlier when I wasn't able to tryout for the JV team due to illness. I didn't really care about either because I was more interested in rock n' roll and trying to learn to play guitar and bass. I felt like I was stunted from learning to play saxophone better in school because they didn't really teach any musical theory or even try to explain why the notes on the pages you were playing from worked together with the other instruments. It was just learn the music and play it. Not learn technique and apply it to the music you are playing. Saxophone to me was an ensemble instrument and I wanted to write songs. So I quit the school band after 10th grade and focused on learning guitar and bass in my spare time. I started some garage bands with friends that went no where but I was having fun and at least was finding my way through the myriad of clicks at the high school by being apart of one that was part outcast, part cool, because we were the rocker people who had long hair, and wore torn jeans and flannel shirts like our heroes in Seattle.
It wasn't until 11th grade that I got an opportunity to pick up the saxophone again. The summer before I had met an incoming sophomore named Brian Madison who was transferring in from the nearby Stuarts Draft High School. Brian played drums in a trio that mostly did Green Day and Nirvana covers. I became good friends with Brian and his bandmates Derek (guitar, lead vocals), and Matt (bass). I ended up starting a side band with Brian where I played bass and we would often open for the other band at school events or socials. This was around '95 or '96 and punk rock had really come back into popularity again. Bands like the aforementioned Green Day, The Offspring, and Sublime were tearing up the alternative rocks charts and making it cool to seemingly not have to play your instrument very well. Along with punk, a subgenre called ska-punk started making it's way into this mainstream. Ska was basically a sped up version of reggae where the guitar rhythms were played on the upbeat instead of the downbeat. It had last gained notoriety in the late 70s/early 80s as part of the "2nd Wave of Ska" with bands like The Specials, The English Beat, and Madness. In an effort to make their band different, Brian asked if I would start playing saxophone on some songs as his band, then going by the name "Lucid", was starting to write and play more originals. I was hesitant at first, but agreed, and started attending rehearsals and playing on a few songs at each of their gigs. Over the next couple of years, the change its name to "Roosevelt's Plan" and go through numerous lineup changes as well as expanding into an 8-piece band including a 4-piece horn section. We also played a ton of shows.
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| A typical Trax show flyer from the RP days. |
I was the oldest of the group and when I graduated high school in '97 decided to attend a local community college so that I could still play in the band. I should also mention that during my senior year of high school, I was voted as best musician in my class for the senior superlatives, which at the time was quite the coup considering I was not a member of the school band. My reputation as a player came strictly through my involvement with RP. The punk rocker in me felt a lot of satisfaction about that, as if I was pointing my middle finger at the school band establishment for not giving a shit about teaching their students anything meaningful. It was around this time that we got our first big break, opening for a band from Richmond, called
The Ernies. Better yet, we were playing at the famed
Trax nightclub in Charlottesville, which was best known as the club where
Dave Matthews Band got their start.
Trax had a capacity of about 900 people and booked a plethora of national touring acts as well as regional and local bands. It became my home away from home and over the next few years went to see a lot of great shows as well getting to share that stage with a tone of great bands from the ska-punk genre including, "
The Toasters", "
The Pietasters", "
Fighting Gravity", and "
The Checkered Cabs". This was the height of this groups success. I started playing baritone sax to fill out our sound and we started playing further and further out of town, frequently traveling to play at clubs like "
Twisters" and "
The Flood Zone" in Richmond, as well as house parties in DC, and beyond. There were even rumors circulating from the
TraxTrax ownership and management staff that some A&R reps from smaller ska/punk labels were showing interest in signing us. During this time I started taking lessons from a teacher that taught at UVA and played in a jazz group with
John D'earth who was another frequent collaborator of
Dave Matthews. He taught me basic music theory and had me learning Coltrane songs and other traditional jazz standards. I auditioned for the VCU School of Music on alto sax and was accepted but ultimately decided to not attend.
Around 1999 the youngest members of Roosevelt's Plan graduated high school and several were planning on attending VCU in the fall. I was also planning to move to Richmond to work on a degree in audio engineering, so assumed we would just all move up that way and continue on. The singer wasn't into that though and was getting burnt out on our style (as was most of the country as by the end of the nineties, ska/punk a genre was running on fumes). In a whirlwind of events suddenly the band was over which also led to my passion for playing saxophone was too. I dove head deep into learning the art of audio engineering and once again made guitar my main instrument of choice. I ended up selling all of my horns in my early twenties for various reasons and thought that was that. Since social media really didn't exist during the time Roosevelt's Plan was together, there's not a lot of archived content available online. Luckily we did record a handful of songs during our time together which I have included in the playlist below:
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| My early 00's Yamaha YTS-62II |
Flash forward again to around March 2022 and my wife Denan and I are hanging out with my best friend Steve Snider and his wife Kim at their house, talking about music and how shitty life had been for the past few years because of the Covid pandemic. They recently went to Kim's parents house and got a bunch of stuff that her parents were getting rid of since they were trying to downsize. They had picked up her dad's vintage stereo equipment, and a slew of other items which included her brothers alto saxophone from when he was younger. Steve has always known me as a bassist or guitarist since we have been playing in bands on and off together for the last 15 years. I had played my wife videos of Roosevelt's Plan performing at
Trax when we were dating and she always got a kick out of seeing my younger self playing saxophone. She started going on about how great that band sounded, especially for how young we were at the time, and how she was kind of disappointed that I stopped playing saxophone so abruptly. Steve went into the house and emerged with a small rectangular case. He said something to the effect of, "Well, happy birthday, here you go." and handed me the case which contained Kim's brothers saxophone. I'm not sure if I was shocked so much by the generosity of my good friends or the fact that when I opened the case I was staring at a
Selmer Bundy II, the exact same type of alto sax as I had played when I started learning in 6th grade. Nostalgia from those days came flooding back instantaneously. It was definitely a moment and I will forever be grateful for Steve and Kim's thoughtful gift that night.
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| Recording "Single for the Summer" |
I won't lie that it took a little longer before I started getting back into it though. I went and bought some new reeds and neck strap for the alto, and squawked out a few notes from time to time, but it never grabbed me. This may sound crazy, but I always felt more comfortable playing on larger horns, like when I played baritone during Roosevelt's Plan's heyday. Maybe I'm just full of too much hot air. Anyways, I never really played a tenor sax when I was younger, but that was the type that the players I was most into were known for:
John Coltrane,
Sonny Rollins,
Clarence Clemons of the
E Street Band, and
Mark Rivera of
Billy Joel and
Foreigner fame. And although I wasn't a huge
Dave Matthews fan when I was younger, I got really into them as time went on, especially spurred on by the fact that my wife is a Charlottesville native and huge fan. Of the hundreds of shows we've been to together,
DMB is the band we've seen the most. Granted that the late, great
Leroi Moore and his successor
Jeff Coffin play pretty much every saxophone equally but I was always drawn to the tenor parts played on songs like "
#41", "
Don't Drink the Water", and "
Grey Street". I think another that got me going was the passing of my sister at the beginning of the year. She was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago and finally succumbed to it in January. She was a gifted writer and had a heavy influence on my tastes in music during my teenage years. Her passing away at such a young age (48) kind of lit a fire in me to make sure that I do everything I can to keep my love of music burning and to express myself musically in any way that I can. So around March of this year I started keeping an eye for a good used tenor sax and in early April I found one, an early 00's
Yamaha YTS-62II which is the first level of Yamaha's pro series of tenor saxophones. The seller was a pro player and had just moved up to a
YTS-82Z so was looking to move this one at a decent price. The timing for this was perfect as I had just been asked to contribute a sax part to a new song that Steve was recording with one of his bands,
The Fan, which is led by singer-songwriter, Jim Ivins. The song was called "
Single for the Summer" and was meant to be a play on the vibe of typical pop songs that radiate over the airwaves during the summer months each year. Although my part in the song is relatively small, it was great to be playing in a studio environment again and contributing to a smartly written song. I even got to play it with them once live shortly after they released the song online.
