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This morning, I made myself a cup of coffee while Trey got ready for strings camp. That sentence sounds ordinary. It is ordinary. That’s exactly the point. While I was still waking up in the kitchen, going through the usual ritual of mentally planning the day ahead, he was downstairs doing everything he needed to do. Showered. Dressed. He gathered his music, his cello, and his phone. He checked his messages from the night before. Brushed his teeth. Took his ADHD meds. Grabbed something to eat. All of it, in order, without anyone having to say a word. No reminder. No list. Unprompted. Parker is doing it too. Getting herself out of bed before I knock on the door. Making herself breakfast. Showering without the nudge. She starts a life skills camp today, run by one of her teachers. It’s just a week long, and she had herself ready well before the 1 o’clock drop-off. I didn’t have to orchestrate any of it. I just watched. Parenting, like teaching, is a long project with a slow reveal. You pour things into people for years, and you can’t always tell what’s landing and what isn’t. You repeat yourself. You model things and hope they’re watching. You correct and encourage and back off and step back in, trying to find the right distance for whatever season you’re in. Somewhere in the middle of that repetition, something grabs. I wasn’t prepared for how quietly it happens. I expected milestones to feel like milestones. I thought there would be a moment I would recognize, like their first steps, something I could point to and say, “there it is.” Instead, it’s been more like I’m making coffee and he’s already handled it. I’m thinking about whether she needs a reminder, and she’s already dressed and by the door. The independence didn’t arrive with fanfare. It just settled in while I wasn’t looking. My favorite musical experiences are those that don’t need to be conducted through every phrase. I notice it in smaller groups like combos or chamber orchestras a lot, but it hits even harder when it’s in a larger ensemble like a big band or the symphony. You play with someone long enough, and they start to anticipate. They hear where you’re going before you get there. The communication goes underground.It happens when the band director can count off a tune and get out of the way of the group, or when the conductor can walk away from the podium during a rehearsal to hear what the orchestra sounds like out in the front of house. That’s when it stops feeling like coordination and starts feeling like something closer to trust. That’s what I felt this morning. Not pride exactly, though that was in there too. More like recognition. Like something I’d been working toward had quietly arrived. Trey recently auditioned to move up to the next level of the youth symphony. Before he went in, he told me what he was feeling, and I love how comfortable my kids have become with that kind of open, honest communication. He wasn’t complaining. He just said, “I’m nervous about the prepared material, but I think I’ll be good.” And he was. He walked in, played, and came out with a smile on his face. “I did better than I expected,” he said. Afterward, one of the administrators asked if he’d consider playing bass with the group he was auditioning out of. I ran it by him. He didn’t say yes right away, and he didn’t say no. He thought it through out loud. He looked at the logistics, the technique it would require, what he’d gain from it, and where it could take him in jazz settings down the line. He came back with a considered answer. Not a kid’s answer. A musician’s answer. “If I do this, what would my schedule look like?” You can’t give someone that. You can put the conditions in place. You can model how to think through a decision, how to name what you’re feeling, and how to stay in the room when it’s uncomfortable. But the moment when they actually do it, when they reach for the tool on their own, and it’s there, that’s different. I see them. Not just the accomplishments, but the process. The way Parker will sit with a book for hours because she found something worth disappearing into. The way Trey will work a problem until he has the language for it. The care they both bring to the people they love, including Christy and myself. The whole point of being a parent, as near as I can tell, is to work yourself out of a job. Give them the tools. Teach them how to use the tools. And then step back and make coffee while they handle the rest. I will always be their parent. I will always be there for them unconditionally. This morning, standing in the kitchen while Trey came up the stairs with everything he needed already in hand, I felt something I didn’t have a name for in the moment. I stood there holding my warm mug. Outside the kitchen window, heavy grey clouds were rolling in. It was going to rain today. My mind started sketching out the sudden shift in logistics. Rain meant a messier drop-off, a slower pick-up, and a tighter window of coordination for what Trey would do while I was dropping Parker off at her camp before picking him up from his. It was the familiar, anxious feeling of a parent trying to make things work. Then I looked back at Trey, already packed and ready by the door, completely unbothered by the weather. I think it was something like, it’s working. 
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There’s a music stand next to the piano in our living room where we display the album jackets that are currently on the turntable. My home stereo setup isn’t quite as elaborate as my dad’s or father-in-law’s was, but the space it lives in is inviting. We used to have an old upright piano against the short wall that served as the focal piece of our music room. We took the front panel off so that the strings and inner workings were exposed. It looked so cool, but it was old and damaged, and there was no restoring it in our future, so we replaced it with a smaller digital console. It still has 88 weighted keys, so it still feels like a real piano, but you can use headphones or change the tones. The space on the wall the old upright piano once occupied is now covered with albums in frames and pictures of family and friends.
The wall next to it has a window with bamboo blinds and guitars displayed on either side. It felt like a natural choice to move the record player under the window on top of a six-cube storage shelf that fits our albums quite nicely alongside our bookshelf speakers. I love walking through the house and glancing over to see what album my kids were listening to last. My daughter has a particular fondness for Green Day. For her eleventh birthday, she asked for their album Dookie. Every time I see it on that music stand, it takes me back to 1994 when I was an eleven-year-old unwrapping the CD case I’d just bought. My friends and I rode our bikes to the brand-new Barnes & Noble. It was the first one in the state, and it was built right in our neighborhood. We used to ride our bikes on the dirt mounds they used to level the lot while they were constructing it. So naturally, when they finally opened, our first order of business was to ride over and listen to the new CDs they had in their music section. I remember huddling around those clunky headphones and scanning the barcode on the back of the CD case to hear a sound clip. That was enough for me. I took the album up to the checker who was guarding the entrance of the music section and pulled out my Velcro wallet. A twenty-dollar bill that was once in a birthday card from my grandma was just enough to cover the $15.67 and still leave enough for a bottle of Fruitopia for the ride back home. It’s one of the most iconic album covers in punk rock. The chaotic, colored-pencil scene captures the high-energy, explosive counterculture of the pop-punk scene in the nineties, featuring the “Bad Year” blimp, planes dropping “DOOKIE” bombs, and the band’s name, GREEN DAY, exploding in all caps out of a mushroom cloud with the album title in lowercase letters on the bottom: dookie. This album was the first one I can remember not getting permission from my parents for; I bought it with my own money. It was the first album that didn’t fit into my parents’ taste, and I was all about it. I learned every word. My sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Whitman, was in disbelief that I knew the words I was singing. She looked like she could be my great aunt. Short, kind, always smiling, and always wearing a sweater buttoned up over her shirt. I remember her asking me if I even knew what “neurotic” or “melodramatic” meant. My daughter, Parker, sings Green Day songs all the time, and I don’t have to question if she knows what the words mean. She’s a brilliant, voracious reader. The eleven-year-old inside me gets so excited when I hear “Basket Case” playing on the speakers in the music room from downstairs, because I know Parker is in her happy place and Green Day’s Dookie album is displayed on that music stand in the corner. If you let the CD spin past the official tracklist in 1994, through minutes of empty silence, a hidden song called “All By Myself” eventually crawls out of the speakers. It’s unlisted, unpolished, and entirely unexpected. I left this album off my original list because it didn’t fit the pristine, curated aesthetic I thought that original post needed. But music is rarely pristine. It took my daughter spinning a thirty-two-year-old pop punk record to remind me that some of the most important tracks in our lives are often the ones we didn’t plan for. The beautiful, unlisted bonus tracks are the surprises that make life beautiful. There was a table at Dave's Place that belonged to us.
Not officially. There was no sign on it, no reservation card, no rope keeping anyone away, but the regulars knew. The staff knew. After a while, even the first-time customers seemed to know. That table was ours, and whoever was sitting at it was family. My grandmother, Mamie Ruth, claimed it first. We called her Memaw. She was quite the lady. A storyteller and an entertainer in the truest sense, the kind of person who could make a stranger feel like a long-lost relative before they'd finished reading the menu. She was educated and well-traveled and had more friends than most people could imagine. They came to visit her daily. She had a gift for listening that I didn't fully understand until I got older. Not the polite kind of listening, where you nod and wait for your turn to speak. The real kind. She was genuinely interested in people. Where they were from. What they did. What mattered to them. A traveling businessman stopping in on a Tuesday afternoon could sit down near our table and within ten minutes find himself telling Memaw things he hadn't thought about in years, laughing at something she said, and leaving with the specific feeling that he had been seen by someone who meant it. She always introduced us. Laura and me. Every time. She didn't let a single person walk through that room without knowing that her son was the owner and the chef, and that these were her grandchildren. She said it with a pride that wasn't boastful. It was just true, and she wanted you to know it. We were hers, and she wanted the world to be aware. That table was where Laura and I grew up between school and bedtime. Homework spread out across the surface during the school year. Afternoon snacks appearing without asking. Memaw holding court, pulling everyone into whatever conversation was already happening. When she passed, and Laura's kids came along, my mom was right there. Then Christy and I had Trey and Parker, and ours moved in right alongside them. The same customers who watched my sister and me grow up watched our children grow up. They watched us become parents. They watched us become teachers, in our own ways. Laura went into early childhood education, pouring herself into the littlest learners. I went the music route. Different paths out of the same place. On Friday nights, when Brandon and I would set up in the corner and the jam session would start pulling people in, the kids would disappear into the back office and come out with handfuls of printer paper to draw and color on. Nobody minded. That was just how it was. I remember a baby walker that made its way through multiple kids and multiple years. Whoever was in it at the time would roll through the dining room with complete confidence, pulling up alongside customers' tables as if stopping by to check in. Not afraid. Not shy. Just present in the way children are when they've never been made to feel unwelcome anywhere. Trey would walk up to my bassist and point at a string. Every time, they let him pluck it. Parker would drift toward my drummer, and he would pick her up and hand her the sticks and let her hit the cymbals. The musicians were patient and generous and completely unfazed, because that was the kind of room it was. Children were part of it. The music was part of it. The food and the laughter and the late conversations and Memaw introducing strangers to each other across tables were all part of the same thing. Everybody was welcome at the family table because everyone was family. Christy and I worried about how our kids would discover new music. Back in our day, if you were awake late enough, somewhere after midnight when the roads emptied out, and the house finally got quiet, there was a good chance you’d hear the voice of Bob Parlocha drifting through the speakers. Calm. Unhurried. Deep enough to sound like your grandfather telling you bedtime stories. Jazz with Bob Parlocha became part of life in a way that is hard to explain to people who grew up with streaming services and playlists. You didn’t choose the music. You followed someone else’s ear for a while. He had a way of making jazz feel welcoming without watering it down. He could move from something familiar into something strange and beautiful without ever sounding like he was lecturing you. He sounded like someone sitting across the room flipping through records he loved and saying, “Listen to this.”
The show reached people during hours when the radio felt most personal. Overnight workers. Musicians coming home from gigs. Students trying to stay awake. Young couples sitting together on a couch after everyone else had gone to sleep. He knew how to let a song breathe. He knew not to interrupt the mood just to remind listeners he was there. Sometimes the space between his voice and the next tune felt just as important as the music itself. The way Miles would leave space between ideas in his playing to let the listener sit with that thought for a moment. What I remember most isn’t necessarily one specific song or interview. It's the feeling that somewhere out there, another person was awake, holding open this little doorway into music for me. That kind of companionship is rare. Radio used to create it all the time, and Bob Parlocha was one of the last people who truly mastered it. He also carried none of the self-importance that sometimes surrounds jazz culture. The show never felt like homework. It never felt like a museum tour where you were expected to already understand everything. He approached the music with reverence and also warmth. You could hear Duke Ellington, Dexter Gordon, Bill Evans, or some younger player you had never encountered before, and it all felt connected. I discovered so much through his playlists. Today, everything is personalized and on demand. Algorithms try to predict what you want before you even know it yourself. His show worked because it came from one human being with deep taste and patience. You surrendered to somebody else’s sensibility for a few hours. That surrender became part of the experience. After his death in 2015, stations continued replaying old episodes because listeners were not ready to lose that voice. People don’t keep returning to archived radio broadcasts just for information. They return because certain voices become tied to memory itself. A certain song comes on, and suddenly you are back on a dark highway, or sitting in a college apartment at one in the morning, or driving home after a gig with the windows cracked just enough to let the night air in. Bob Parlocha wasn't just a radio host. He was a huge part of my musical discovery. Musician friends mention it in passing, and suddenly an entire origin story unfolds. First gigs. First jam sessions. First time hearing somebody and realizing music could be a life. First dates. First nights that stretched too late and somehow changed everything. Everyone seems to carry a different Afterthought. I never told anyone I was working on this piece, but I felt pulled toward writing about the Afterthought and the giant hole it left in our musical community last week, while sitting at my son’s end-of-the-year party across the street from the shell of what was once the Afterthought. People felt it immediately, but I don’t think we understood the gravity of it until years later. When the mural panels ended up at Dave’s Place, I felt connected to that. There was something right about a physical piece of that room surviving. Music was still being made in front of it. New memories forming underneath old ones. Then Dave’s Place followed the same inevitable path. Nobody wanted us to close. Everyone said the same thing people had said about the Afterthought: When are you going to reopen? Someone should bring it back. Maybe that’s because we misunderstand what made those places special. The Afterthought wasn’t just a room. Dave’s Place wasn’t just a room. Those places existed exactly when they needed to exist. Recreating the furniture, the stage, the menu, the walls…that isn’t the same as recreating the people who found each other there. Lately, I’ve caught myself wondering if that’s part of what we’re building at Moody Brews. Not another Dave’s Place. Not another Afterthought. But another place where community forms quietly. Where people become family. Where memories are being made, and origin stories are beginning. Most of us won’t hear those stories until long after we’ve moved on. Not because we wanted to move on. Just because that’s what life does. The Afterthought was where everything started for me, but most of the kids coming to the jam at Moody Brews never even knew the Afterthought. It’s where I cut my teeth in the jazz world. My first jam session. My first real combo experience. The first time I learned what it felt like to not just practice jazz, but to actually play jazz with people who knew what they were doing. Looking back now, it’s hard to overstate how much that room shaped me as a musician. The room had history. Serious history. Looking back now, it’s astonishing how many players passed through that room before I even knew what a saxophone was. But it never felt exclusive to me. On any given night, you might end up sitting next to a businessman relaxing after work, a local representative, a city board member, or somebody who had been coming there every Thursday for twenty years. People came to listen. People came to talk. People came because that room had become part of their routine. That mix always felt special to me. National-level players on the stand, regulars at the tables, and somehow it all felt completely normal. From the outside, it didn’t announce itself. It just sat quietly on the corner of Beechwood and Kavanaugh in Hillcrest with nothing to prove. Inside felt different. Huge floor-to-ceiling glass windows lined the Kavanaugh side, and from the bandstand area, you could watch cars pass while you played. There wasn’t a proper stage. Just a section of parquet wood floor in front of five giant floor-to-ceiling panels painted with a mural depicting a busy New Orleans square full of life and music. Off in the opposite corner sat an old black grand piano. Not polished. Not meant to impress anybody. Just there. Across from it was a fireplace built into the middle of the dimly lit dining room. At the back of the room, opposite those big windows up front, was a full bar with every spirit you could imagine lining the walls. It felt like one of those places that already had stories before you walked in and kept collecting them after you left because it was. My dad actually took me there when I was in high school to hear a friend of his play. At some point during the night, he convinced them to let me sit in. I was fifteen years old. I don’t remember everything I played. I’m sure some of it was rough. But I remember the feeling of being in that room and realizing, maybe for the first time, that this was something I wanted to chase. Over the years, The Afterthought became more than just a place I played. It became part of the rhythm of my life. I spent countless nights there listening, learning, sitting in, subbing with different groups, and eventually leading my own nights. Some nights were quiet and conversational. Other nights felt electric from the first tune. Almost every night eventually turned into a jam session. You’d start the evening with one group on the schedule, but by the second set, there might be extra horn players standing around the bandstand, a singer getting talked into sitting in, or a musician visiting from out of town quietly unpacking a horn case near the bar. Nobody really thought twice about it. That was just what happened there. And when the music connected, the room changed. You could feel conversations stop. Ice would stop clinking in glasses. The room would slowly lean in toward the bandstand until all that seemed to exist was the music itself. And if one loud drunk at the bar missed the cue and kept talking over the band, they usually didn’t last long. Not because management stepped in, but because the audience cared enough to protect the room. People came there to listen. That always meant something to me. The musicians who played there pushed each other, too. Nobody had to say anything outright. You could just feel the standard in the room. And yet for all the talent that passed through there, what I remember most now is the feeling. The feeling of setting up a horn while hearing glasses and quiet conversation in the background. The sound of somebody counting off a tune while traffic rolled by outside those giant windows. The warmth of the fireplace in winter. The low light. The mural behind the band. The sense that something special might happen at any moment. More nights than I can recall ended with that feeling that the band had somehow become bigger than the individual musicians on stage. Those were the nights that kept all of us coming back. Places like that don’t really disappear. Even after the doors close, they keep showing up. The Afterthought may be gone now, but for those of us who spent part of our lives inside that little corner room in Hillcrest, it never really left us.   Parker Jean We were walking along the river on one of those perfect fall evenings. Cool air coming off the water. The light starting to flatten out and turn everything softer. Trees doing that thing they do in October when everything turns gold and rust, and you remember why you live somewhere like this. Parker bent down and picked up a sweet-gum ball from the edge of the path and held it by the stem. Turned it slowly in the light. Not absentmindedly. Not the way kids sometimes pick things up just to have something in their hands. She studied it. She looked at it the way somebody looks at something they assume is worth noticing. I recognized the moment immediately. Not because of the sweet-gum ball. Because of her. That’s Parker. She notices things. Not in a dramatic way and not in a look-what-I-found kind of way. She just pays attention in a way that feels increasingly rare. She’ll stop for something most people step over without ever realizing it was there. A strange shadow across the floor. Light through a window at the right time of day. A sentence in a book that says exactly what it meant to say. She doesn’t seem especially interested in rushing past things, and because of that, she sees more. She has tried many things throughout her young childhood, and was good at all of them. She started playing the cello because her brother, Trey, played cello, but eventually she realized she didn’t actually love it. Same with piano and dance. I’ve always admired that about her. When the kids joined the track team, I honestly didn’t know what to expect. Track wasn’t my thing growing up. I was a baseball, tennis, basketball kid. Running always felt more like something you did between the things I actually wanted to do. Earlier in the year, Trey joined cross-country and really found something there. He loved seeing himself improve. He loved the challenge of it. So when his coach suggested track, it felt like the next right thing. Parker's joining was the surprise. She’s never really shown much interest in running, but if I’m being fair, I should know better by now than to be surprised by Parker. She has a way of quietly becoming interested in things you never saw coming. This was Trey's last year at Anthony, and he was determined to squeeze every bit out of it. He kept encouraging Parker to try things. To sign up. To jump in. There’s something about siblings that’s hard to explain if you haven’t watched them up close. They know exactly how to push each other’s buttons and support each other at the same time. Track practice was hard. Every practice. New workouts. Sprints. Long runs. Arkansas heat and humidity doing their thing, and Parker cried after more practices than I expected. More than once, I was ready to tell her she didn’t have to do this, but she never wanted to quit. She just wanted to keep going. It finally clicked for me that she wasn’t measuring herself against the other runners. She wasn’t worried about who finished first. She was competing against herself. Could she finish? Could she do something today that she couldn’t do last week? Could she stay with something even when it was uncomfortable? And every race she finished answered those questions. Smiling all the way around the track. Those track meets ended up changing how I think about running sports. I thought it was going to be about times and places. Instead, I watched kids learn resilience. I watched them push themselves physically, but also mentally and emotionally. I watched teammates cheering for runners who weren’t even in their heat or on their team. I watched kids celebrate personal records with the same excitement as first place. It felt like a team sport in a way I’ve never really experienced before, and that’s when I realized Parker already understood something I was still learning. Sometimes winning is just seeing something through. She doesn’t stay in things out of obligation or because she’s good at it. She gives them a real chance. She shows up fully. And if something doesn’t connect with her in a way she recognizes, she moves on without making a big announcement about it. No drama. No identity crisis. Just honesty. That feels harder than we make it sound. She sings beautifully and can play the drums. Music is woven into our family in all the ways you’d expect, but she’s never seemed especially interested in standing in front of it. She’s done school plays and musicals, and what always stands out isn’t volume or trying to steal attention. She disappears into the character. The same way she disappears into books. The same way she disappeared into that sweet-gum ball. You watch and realize she isn’t performing for anyone. She’s inside the thing. I think back to Trey at her age. With him, it felt like there was a stretch of middle school where things slowly started clicking into place. Seventh grade, especially. Then eighth grade came around, and suddenly you could see all this quiet confidence that had been building for years. Parker is still in the middle of that becoming. She has years of middle school ahead of her, and I find myself genuinely excited to watch what those years will reveal. Not because I’m waiting for her to find her thing. I’m not. I think she already knows something that takes a lot of us much longer to learn. You don’t always find what matters by moving faster. Sometimes you find it because you stopped and paid attention to what others tend to overlook. Because you picked something up. Because you turned it slowly in the light long enough to see what was actually there. When the thing that’s hers finally shows itself, she'll stop, pick it up, and turn it slowly in the light, and she'll already know exactly what to do with it.   After I drop my kids off at school in the morning, my day usually goes one of two ways. I get coffee either way. That part is non-negotiable, but after that, I either head to the dog park with the dogs or I come home to my horns. Both are good mornings. Both are part of the same life. The difference is what I bring back from each one.
On the mornings I come home to the horns, it’s almost always the tenor unless I have a gig coming up that calls for something else, like alto or bari. I teach lessons several times a week and gig regularly enough that my horns stay ready to travel at a moment's notice. The case is never really closed the way it might be for someone who only plays occasionally. The horn is just between uses. That matters more than it sounds. I grab the horn from the music closet and walk downstairs to my desk. The first thing I do is pull up whatever song I am working on and start it playing. The music goes on before the horn comes out of the case. In fact, I sometimes have the song on in the car on my way home. That is not an accident. It means by the time I am assembling the instrument, I am already inside the music. Already listening. Already oriented toward something. I get my reeds out and put one in my mouth to hold while I pull out the rest of the horn and put the neck on the body. Then I pull out the mouthpiece, carefully set the reed, and tighten the ligature. Before I play the song, I just play long tones while the recording runs in the background. Finding the sweet spot on the reed and tuning at the same time. Not two separate tasks. One task. Those first notes set the tone of what happens next. Sometimes I run the melody of whatever is playing. Sometimes I start mimicking whoever is soloing, catching little licks and phrases I want to keep. Sometimes I run scale patterns. If it is a tune I know well, I find different recordings of it, so I do not get locked into one person's version. I want to hear how three or four different musicians approached the same material. Where they agree. Where they diverge. What the tune sounds like when it belongs to someone else. This is what my practice looks like a lot of times. Not a formal session with a structured plan. Music playing, horn in hand, ears open, time passing, and an hour is gone before I even notice. But I want to be honest about something before I go any further. That is what practice looks like on the good days. There are days when the hardest part of practicing has nothing to do with music. It is opening the case. You walk past the instrument. You think about practicing. You mentally rehearse practicing. You tell yourself you will do it after coffee, after checking some emails, after dinner, after the kids are in bed. Somehow, the horn never leaves the case. I think a lot of musicians quietly assume that discipline means always feeling excited to practice. That the serious players wake up every morning eager to get after it. That the resistance is a sign of something wrong with you, some deficit of commitment or love for the music. I don’t think that is true at all. I think inspiration and practice aren’t the same thing. Sometimes you practice because you feel inspired, but a lot of times, you feel inspired because you practiced. That distinction matters so much. Waiting to feel ready before putting in the work is one of the biggest traps a musician can fall into. The feeling of readiness is not a reliable signal. It shows up when it wants to. You cannot schedule it. What you can do is show up anyway and see what happens when the horn is actually in your hands. When I was younger, I thought practicing meant playing more. More scales. More hours. More exercises. More notes. And while all of those things mattered, the most important practice I ever did, didn’t involve the horn at all. Real listening. Not music as background noise. Not an album on while you are doing something else, but the kind of listening where you stop and follow a single instrument through an entire performance. Where you hear how a drummer places the snare slightly behind the beat, how a bassist shapes the time rather than just marking it, how a singer phrases the same line differently the second time through, and why. I listened almost exclusively to saxophone players because I wanted to learn the saxophone when I was younger. What I understand now is that some of the most important musical lessons I ever received came from listening to musicians who did not play my instrument. I learned phrasing from singers. I learned space from Miles Davis, who understood that what you leave out is just as important as what you put in. I learned storytelling from Wes Montgomery, who could build a solo like a novel, with an opening, a development, and a resolution that felt inevitable in hindsight, even though you never saw it coming. None of that required the horn to be out of the case. Young musicians might feel like time spent without the instrument in hand doesn’t count as practice. But deep listening can change your playing long before you touch the horn. It builds the internal library. It shapes what you hear in your head when you are playing, which determines what you reach for. You can only play what you can hear, and you can only hear what you have listened to. On the days when opening the case feels impossible, putting on a record and actually listening is my practice. I spent years trying to play fast like what I heard on the records. Speed is exciting when you are younger because it feels measurable. You can hear yourself improving week to week. But I have played for enough audiences and worked with enough musicians to know that audiences rarely remember how fast you played. They do remember how you made them feel. A musician with a deep, settled time-feel can make two notes sound like something. A musician with shaky time can play a thousand notes and still leave the room unmoved. The difference between skating on top of a groove and sitting inside it is something you feel before you hear it in your playing. When the time-feel is right, there is a physical sensation of release. Like the music is carrying you instead of the other way around. Getting to that feeling takes slow, patient, sometimes tedious work with a metronome on beats two and four, locking in with recordings, learning how subdivisions feel rather than just how to count them. It is not a glamorous practice, but it quietly changes everything. Speaking of quietly, there’s another practice many musicians avoid because it does not feel like progress. Playing at different dynamics. Young musicians are often encouraged to play louder because a full tone requires supported air, and supported air tends to produce volume. But a full tone doesn’t always mean loud. Loud can get confused with good, and volume can cover a lot of shortcomings. A slightly unfocused tone sounds more confident at full volume. Shaky articulation gets blurred by the density of the sound. Play quietly, and none of that is available anymore. Controlled, quiet playing exposes everything: the actual quality of the tone, whether the air is really supporting it, how the articulation starts and stops each note, and where the tension lives. Some of the most challenging practice sessions I have had involved playing long tones as quietly and steadily as possible. Not glamorous. Not the kind of practice that makes you feel like a jazz hero afterward. On the days when everything feels heavy, playing quietly for twenty minutes will teach you more about the instrument and your breath support than an hour at full volume. Give it a try and tell me you don’t notice a difference when you switch back to playing the same passage at full volume. Then, there are things you simply cannot learn alone. You can become technically advanced in a practice room. You can develop a beautiful tone, impeccable timing, and a deep vocabulary. And then you walk into a room with other musicians and find that none of it quite transfers the way you expected. Playing music with other people is a different skill from playing music by yourself, and the only way to develop it is to do it. I don’t say this lightly, but the jam session taught me more about music than any practice room did. Not because every session was good. Many of them weren't. But because live interaction with other musicians forces you to adapt in real time, and the only way to get better at adapting is to do it over and over until the responses become instinctive. If you are practicing alone, you are practicing the vocabulary. But the only place you learn how to actually speak is in a room with other people. I didn't learn most of this in a classroom. I learned it the slow way, through years of playing, through making mistakes that took a long time to understand, through watching students make the same discoveries I made, and by trying to give them a slightly shorter path to get there. If I could go back and sit with my younger self, I wouldn’t give him a practice schedule. I would tell him that the discipline is simpler and harder than he thinks. Simpler because it really does come down to opening the case. Harder because some mornings, that is the most difficult thing in the world. I would tell him that inspiration follows action more reliably than it precedes it. That the session he dreads is sometimes the one that moves him. That playing quietly for twenty minutes will teach him more about the instrument than an hour at full volume. That time-feel matters more than speed, and that he will know this is true long before he acts on it. I would tell him to listen to singers. To listen to drummers. To listen to musicians who do not play his instrument and to figure out why they move him anyway. I would tell him to play with other people every chance he gets, and to be the least experienced person in the room whenever possible. And I would tell him that the days when the horn feels heavy and the case feels like it weighs a hundred pounds are not signs that the love is gone. They are just part of it. Open the case. Play for five minutes. See what happens. Most of the time, something happens.  Trey left his cello case open backstage. He had just crossed the stage to get his 8th-grade diploma, honors cords around his neck, looking calm and relaxed. According to The Anthony School website, it’s “a place where children discover their strengths, grow in confidence, and develop a lifelong love of learning,” combining “challenging academics with a supportive, nurturing environment.” Trey started here in PreK3, and now his band was about to close the ceremony. They were playing Green Day’s Good Riddance, with my son on cello. The audience had no idea what was coming. Their performance was a surprise. Inside the case was a gift from his teacher, Jeremy Estell. A vinyl record. Wynton Marsalis - Early Marsalis, released in 1983 in Japan on the Atlas East label. And a note. Jeremy wasn't just Trey's school teacher. He was usually one of the first faces that every middle school student at Anthony saw during morning drop-off. He was his French teacher. His cross-country coach. His track coach. Trey had never run cross country or track before Jeremy. He showed up anyway, and Jeremy was there the whole way. Encouraging, patient, present. That's who Jeremy is. He doesn't just teach the subject, he guides them through it. There wasn’t a single cross-country or track practice he didn’t run with the kids. He shows up for the person. I’d noticed a connection at the end of last school year. One of Trey’s best friends, Ewan, landed a lead role in a theater production of School of Rock. Jeremy got the role of his father. I’m not sure how much acting actually had to happen to make his role convincing because he’s been mentoring these students for years. When Trey and his friends decided they wanted to start a band, Jeremy stayed after school on his own time to make it happen. He brought his own gear up to the school. His amps. His microphones. He plugged in his guitar and sang alongside them, not as a supervisor watching from a safe distance, but as a musician in the room who believed in what they were trying to do. He gave them a place to figure it out. And then he started coming out to Moody Brews on Friday nights. Sitting in the courtyard. Watching Trey find his footing on the bandstand week after week. He didn't have to do that. It wasn't part of any job description. He just kept showing up, the way people do when they genuinely care about what happens to a kid after the school day ends. Jeremy's note explained that he couldn't remember when, where, or how this record came into his possession. He knew it was one of the first records he ever bought, about 25 years ago. It didn't travel with him to France. Every year he came home to visit his family, he played it seemingly nonstop. It just felt like home, and he’d kept it in heavy rotation all these years. He wanted Trey to have his copy. The part of the note that really got to me was about a specific song on the album. The one where they bring out Wynton's father to play with him. Jeremy wrote about his own dad playing drums and about what it means to make music with the people you love most. Jamming with my dad or with my son is beyond magical. One of the most difficult pieces I’ve written was the “Albums that had a major impact on me” post I made back in 2019 on my blog. That grouping of 9 albums took me forever to compile. Not because I couldn’t come up with enough material, but because it was so hard to narrow down just a handful of albums that made a difference. I didn't consider that Jeremy had his own versions of these stories. A record that felt like home every time he came back to it. That he kept in heavy rotation for 25 years. And on the night Trey closed the longest chapter of his young life and stepped into the next, Jeremy put it in his cello case with a note that said, “I believe in you. Thank you for sharing your gift with me.” That's not just a graduation gift. That's a baton. This leg of the 4x200 was done. Trey doesn't know what that record will mean to him yet. Maybe it becomes the one he plays nonstop on the way home from his girlfriend's house. Maybe it's the one that teaches him something about what a bass can say that he hasn't heard yet. Maybe it sits on a shelf for years and finds him later, exactly when he needs it. That's how these things work sometimes. They wait. I think about my band director, Rex Perry, standing at the front of the classroom playing until he turned red in the face for a room full of high school kids who didn't fully understand what they were witnessing. I think about a stranger standing at the front door of my restaurant holding an old case, wanting nothing except to hear his father's saxophone played one more time. I think about my high school friend, Matt Treadway, handing me a Bela Fleck record in the school parking lot behind the bandroom when I was seventeen. I think about what I felt the night Trey played Lucky Southern with me, and I couldn't find the words at the microphone. It moves through you. And when the time comes, you send it forward. Jeremy Estell sent it forward. A cello case was sitting open backstage that night, and inside it was a piece of someone's life carefully passed to my son with a note that said, “I believe in you.”
What happens when a community gets to witness something real growing in front of them over time? They became part of the story without even realizing it. That's what Pettaway has become. Not just a Friday night gig with my friend Chris Parker at a brewery, but a place where something is actually happening week after week.
I've been paying attention to the faces in the crowd on Friday nights. Not in a performer-scanning-the-room kind of way, but more like, I'll be in the middle of a tune, and I'll catch a glimpse of someone at one of the courtyard tables, and something in their expression stops me for a second. There are a few groups of people out there who have been following this story without knowing they were part of it. They were there in the beginning, when it was just the duo. Chris and I. When Trey was just another kid sitting at a table with his family on a Friday night. They were there when a young college student showed up with a drum kit and sat in for the first time, changing the entire dynamic of the music. They were there when other horn players joined in, adding harmony and texture to the evolving group of musicians that came to sit in and jam from week to week. And they were there when that drummer looked over at my son and said, out loud, “Why don’t you play with us?” A week later, they watched him move from the audience to the edge of the bandstand, and they were there the first time he played Lucky Southern. They saw what happened to me when that tune was over. I couldn't say much. I got to the mic, and the only words I could find were, "That's my 14-year-old son on the bass, y'all.” That was it. That was everything I had. I watch those faces when Trey is on the bandstand, learning a tune in real time, right there in front of everyone. No rehearsal, no chart in front of him. Just his ears and the music with me and Chris moving through the changes together, guiding without stopping. And the people out there in the courtyard, the ones who've been there long enough to know the arc of this, their faces do something I don't have good words for. It starts as astonishment. Then it shifts to something closer to disbelief. Then they smile. Not politely. The real kind. I think what they're feeling is what I feel every time it happens. That this is not a performance. Nobody rehearsed this. It’s happening in real time. You can see it on their faces, and probably mine too. They keep coming back because they want to see what happens next. So do I. Every Friday night when the weather is nice at Moody Brews. Come find a spot in the courtyard. Trey didn't say much before we started.
That's something I've noticed about him. He doesn't announce himself. Doesn't need to. He just picks up the bass and waits. Most young musicians fill the silence before the first note with a nervous energy. Adjusting, fidgeting, looking around to see if anyone's watching. Trey just...settles in. I've seen it before. At the starting line before a cross-country race. On the tennis court. Walking into a big test. Waiting before a cello recital. Same thing every time. No fidgeting. No bouncing around. Just present. Just ready. Waiting. It used to catch me off guard when he was younger. You expect kids to burn off that energy somehow. He never did. He just got still. The courtyard at Moody Brews was packed last night. The crowds continue to grow from week to week. Families filling up every table, kids running between chairs, conversations layered on top of each other. That kind of energy can swallow a musician whole if they let it. It's already happening. You either find your way into it or you spend the whole night chasing it. Trey walked right into it with 2 of his friends who hadn't been before. Bass on his back and amp in his arms. A smile on his face like he'd just walked into a family reunion. I could see him from where I was standing. He wasn't doing the thing some younger players do, where they try to look comfortable because they're not. He was just present. Ears open. Ready. He walked up to the area where we were set up and plugged in his gear. He quietly tuned his bass, and we started. He was there from the first note. There's a thing that happens when a musician feels comfortable. You can hear it immediately, and that's what I heard from Trey last night. Chris has that same quality. He doesn't announce what he's doing. He just plays, and somewhere in the middle of it, he's already shown you exactly where to go without ever stopping to point. Last night, he was guiding Trey through tunes Trey had never played before. Not by explaining them. Not by stopping to teach. Just by being so present and so clear in what he was laying down, Trey's ears had everything they needed. Like a sensei who doesn't tell the student what they're learning until they've already learned it. That's a rare thing. The ability to lead without making anyone feel led. To create enough space and enough light that the person next to you finds their own way through. Chris does it naturally. It's that same quiet confidence, just expressed from the other side of the conversation. He wasn't calculating his next move. He was just playing, responding, listening, and moving through the music the way you move through a room you know well. No hesitation. No second-guessing. Just doing the thing he does, in front of a full courtyard, like it was the only natural place to be. What does confidence look like on the bandstand? The loud version is easy to spot. Big gestures, big sound, the kind of playing that announces itself before it says anything. That version has its place, but the quiet version is different. Quiet confidence doesn't only come from feeling ready. It comes from trusting your setting enough that you can stop thinking about being ready and just play. It's the thing that lets a musician walk into a packed courtyard, feel all of that energy, and not let it pull them out of the music. Most of the crowd didn't know any of the backstory. They just knew something felt right. That's how it works when a musician is genuinely inside the music. The audience feels it even if they can't explain why. After we finished, I didn't say a lot to Trey about it. He didn't need me to. He already knew what had happened out there. I said, "You sounded good, buddy." He responded, "Thanks! It felt good." Brandon pulled me aside at some point during the night and told me how proud he was of Trey. He said that while he was playing, he forgot Trey was on the bass. Not because Trey disappeared into the background, but because the foundation was so solid, he just trusted it and stopped thinking about it. That's one of the highest compliments you can pay a bassist. When the foundation is that secure, everyone else gets to play freer. Brandon knows that better than most. Coming from him, it meant something. What a night. A packed courtyard. A young musician stepping into something real and not flinching. Not because nothing was at stake. But because he'd trusted his ears and had the right people beside him. That's quiet confidence. It doesn't announce itself. You just hear it in the first note, and you know. |
AuthorDave Williams II Archives
May 2026
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