As a sax­o­phone player, prob­a­bly the most dif­fi­cult thing about liv­ing in New York was find­ing a way to prac­tice with­out pissing-off my neigh­bors. By neces­sity, most New York­ers live stacked on top of one another, often in what are called “pre-war”(Spanish-American War, in some cases) ten­e­ment build­ings,  in tiny apart­ments sep­a­rated by walls about as thick as a slice of Famous Ray’s. Peace and quiet is a rel­a­tive thing at best, with the sound of traf­fic and all-night cel­e­bra­tions on the street out­side your win­dow a con­stant accom­pa­ni­ment (this being espe­cially true when I lived in the East Vil­lage, which by the mid-90s was well on its way to becom­ing Yup­pie Party Cen­tral). I always felt funny about adding my horn on top of the per­pet­ual cacoph­ony that is daily life in the city. I’d grown up in Okla­homa, where keepin’ quiet and stayin’ out of each oth­ers’ bid­ness was a way of life.

Con­se­quently, I tended to prac­tice in a sub-tone, or with a sock stuck in my bell. And that’s when I felt com­fort­able putting any air at all through the horn. More often, I’d sim­ply work my fin­gers on the keys, the quiet pops of the pads sub­sti­tut­ing for the full-throated sound of a sax­o­phone prop­erly blown.  My great­est fear was to bug some jazz-hating neigh­bor to the point where he’d com­plain to my land­lord and I’d lose my lease. That would be bad. Even then, in the early 90s, there weren’t many $400 apart­ments to be had in Manhattan.

Not every musi­cian was so care­ful. Any­one who ever walked across the East Vil­lage on a hot sum­mer day back then knows that. The sounds of  invis­i­ble sax­o­phon­ists wafted from open win­dows, one segue­ing into another as you walked around the neigh­bor­hood. When I lived on East 3rd Street between A & B, my next door neigh­bor was a trum­peter who had the unfor­tu­nate habit of com­ing home drunk at 3 o’clock in the morn­ing to argue with his girl­friend and prac­tice his horn (surely the two activ­i­ties were related). Many a night I was jolted awake by angry shouts and the buzz of a Har­mon mute inches from my ear, sep­a­rated only by a wall that pos­sessed all the sound-insulating prop­er­ties of fresh moz­zarella. Some­times I’d bang on the wall. More often I’d let it slide.  I could relate.

Now that I think of it, I won­der if maybe my switch to soprano from alto in 1989 was a response to the prob­lem of vol­ume when it came to prac­tic­ing in the city. At that time I was liv­ing in a base­ment apart­ment in Asto­ria, beneath the house of a Croa­t­ian woman who lived with her two teenage daugh­ters. I know that sounds like the setup to a dirty joke, but there was no hanky panky. They were really just very nice peo­ple. I def­i­nitely remem­ber not want­ing to dis­turb them with my play­ing. The main rea­son I switched was the fact that my alto was banged up and I couldn’t afford to give it the over­haul it needed. But a sec­ondary rea­son might’ve been the fact that the soprano sim­ply didn’t make as much noise.

My sound cer­tainly suf­fered in my early years in the city, mostly because I felt inhib­ited from play­ing as strong as I would’ve liked. I recorded every note I played back then. Today I can’t lis­ten to those tapes. My play­ing suf­fered from a paucity of sound that dri­ves me crazy today. You per­form the way you prac­tice. I prac­ticed wimpy. I was a wimp. I prob­a­bly should’ve been flip­pin’ the bird to my neigh­bors all those years and prac­ticed as loud and as often as I liked. Unfor­tu­nately for my sax play­ing, I never could shake my, um … excessively-considerate nature.

I got my best prac­tic­ing done in Cen­tral Park. For eight years I worked a day gig at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum of Art. For a few of those years, when the weather was good, I’d bring my soprano to work and, on my lunch break, repair to a cer­tain rock for­ma­tion in the park behind the museum. I’d usu­ally get a good half-hour, forty-five min­utes in. I could play as loud as I like, both­er­ing – and both­ered by – nobody but the

squir­rels and rats scur­ry­ing in and out of the rocks and leaves … although on one occa­sion I got yelled at by a lit­tle old lady pass­ing on a nearby path: “You stop that! You stop that noise!” I smiled and waved, pre­tend­ing not to understand.

When I lived in the East Vil­lage, prac­tic­ing wasn’t as big of an issue, sim­ply because I was play­ing so much with other peo­ple – gigs some­times, but mostly infor­mal ses­sions, held at places like an old aban­doned pub­lic school gym­na­sium (haunted, I swear), var­i­ous decrepit store­fronts and base­ments (when such places were cheap enough for musi­cians to rent as liv­ing spaces), and Con­text Stu­dios on Avenue A (a dump that nev­er­the­less pro­vided pass­able rehearsal space at a decent price). My sound blos­somed dur­ing that era. I was play­ing loud in the com­pany of other musi­cians doing the same, and it was heavenly.

That said, there’s no sub­sti­tute for inten­sive prac­tic­ing, both in terms of sound pro­duc­tion and tech­nique, and that’s some­thing I was only able to do after I left the city. In 1998, a few months after the birth of our first child, my wife and I moved to Mount Ver­non, just out­side NYC, where we rented an apart­ment in a build­ing not unlike the one we’d just left on the Lower East Side, only some­what larger. It was nice to have more room, but the neigh­bors were prob­a­bly even more inclined to be dis­turbed by the free jazz-playing sax­o­phon­ist liv­ing next door. As a con­se­quence, things didn’t much improve, practice-wise. In fact, I stopped play­ing the horn alto­gether for a time, con­cen­trat­ing instead on cre­at­ing weird music on a com­puter, which I could play as loud as my ears could stand, pro­vided I used head­phones. We lived there for three years. Most of that time, prac­tic­ing wasn’t an issue. I didn’t play sax­o­phone anymore.

Things changed. In 2001 our sec­ond child was born. Addi­tional liv­ing space was a neces­sity or at least highly desir­able. My wife and I felt like, with two kids, we were no longer artsy Bohemi­ans. We were grownups, and we should start act­ing the part. We decided to buy a house. Start­ing as near the city as pos­si­ble, we began look­ing for some­thing we could afford. First in lower Westch­ester County, where about the only things in our price range were caves dug out of the ground by home­less junkies emi­grat­ing from the Bronx, then grad­u­ally fur­ther upstate. We looked in upper Westch­ester, then Put­nam County, before stum­bling upon Pawl­ing, a nice lit­tle vil­lage on the Metro North Harlem line, about an hour-and-a-half north of the city. A hous­ing devel­op­ment was going up out­side of town. The houses were pretty big and rea­son­ably priced. We man­aged to get a loan and bought one.

It was the best thing we could’ve done, for the fam­ily, and for me as a musi­cian. I’d never really kicked the sax­o­phone habit. The attrac­tion of being able to play my horn as loud and as often as I wanted – for the first time in my life, really – was too much to resist. Within a few months of mov­ing into the house, I’d put my lap­top  aside and was play­ing my horn again. Soon, I was prac­tic­ing every spare moment, between con­stant diaper-changings and trips to the pediatrician.

I put as much air through my soprano as it could take. When the soprano proved to be insuf­fi­ciently pow­er­ful, I bought a tenor, then an alto. I found the per­fect spot at the the top of the stairs, where blow­ing the horns at full vol­ume seemed to vibrate the entire house to its foun­da­tion. Sud­denly I rec­og­nized the virtues and dis­cov­ered the tech­niques of Albert Ayler (“Oh, that’s how he did that!”). Not only did my sound get big, my chops got big­ger, too. My play­ing evolved and improved more in the eight years after mov­ing to Pawl­ing than it did in any sim­i­lar period in the pre­vi­ous 30 years. In my 40s, I finally became myself.

Look­ing back, I won­der how any acoustic musi­cian really man­ages to reach his or her poten­tial liv­ing in New York City, given the prob­lems involved in sim­ply being able to prac­tice your instru­ment. I guess most peo­ple who do it are less inhib­ited than I am. Who knows? Maybe if I’d stayed in the city, I’d have lost my uptight-ness and began rat­tling the win­dows of my East 3rd Street apart­ment sev­eral hours a day, the way I now do in my house upstate. I didn’t do it in the 12 years I did live there, how­ever, so there’s really no rea­son to believe it would’ve happened.

Any­way, all’s well that ends well. I now live in about as peace­ful and as quiet a place as you can imag­ine … a place where I can play as loud and as long as I want, with­out both­er­ing any­body. Ironic, right?

Even my Yel­low Lab digs my play­ing. She fol­lows me all over the house (I’m a peri­patetic prac­ticer), tail a’ wag­ging – always happy, no mat­ter how hard and fast and loud I play. Turns out, I didn’t have to change my essen­tial nature at all. I found a place where I can avoid bug­ging peo­ple (and ani­mals, like those poor Cen­tral Park squir­rels and rats), yet still enjoy the won­ders of blow­ing with lungs fully extended.

Take that, lit­tle old lady in the park.