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I come from a long line of storytellers. Anyone who has ever gotten to know us says the same. I've heard the phrase "gift of gab" more than a hundred times when describing my dad's side of the family. I didn't know anyone older than my grandma, so that's mostly my frame of reference, but I've heard stories about her parents and theirs.
Growing up, people would always tell me how great my dad was at storytelling. A seemingly 5-minute conversation would quickly turn into 45 minutes before you knew it. Same with his siblings, Aunt Ruth and Uncle Finley. Dad is the youngest of three, with five years between each of them, all having that same gift of gab. Their stories grab hold of you. Even something as mundane as going to check the mail can turn into the most immersive scene with main characters and origin stories, and tragedy. I remember my uncle telling me about making oatmeal as a kid. Something to note, he's pretty particular about certain foods and how they're prepared, his oatmeal being one of them. But I remember being completely drawn into this story as a kid. I could see him there at the kitchen table getting the balance just right. I could smell the aromas in the kitchen and hear the conversations in each person's voice, even though I didn't know what they sounded like back then. I could actually feel the thud of the bowl as it was broken over his head and feel the warmth of the oatmeal pouring down his forehead. The descriptions were so poignant and clear. And I could taste that perfectly balanced buttery and sweet oatmeal when he tasted it, noting how it was quite possibly the best oatmeal he'd ever made. My grandmother's friends often spoke of her storytelling. They would recall specific stories she would tell, like her taking train rides as a young girl down to El Dorado to visit her grandmother, or holding elevator buttons during crucial moments in treacherous political climates. One of my favorites was the opossum story. She would tickle herself as she retold it, and it never got old. No matter how many times I heard it, it felt fresh and exciting. Even if I knew how it ended, I would still get sucked into the description of the environment and what was running through her head in that moment. It was like she was reliving it every single time, and we were all there with her. As a proper southern lady who has called someone to come over and help her get an opossum out of her house, of course, the first thing she thinks of is, "Should I prepare some snacks to have ready for when they get here?" and "What do you serve at an opossum party, cheese and crackers?" There was a last time she told that story. None of us knew it was the last time. That's how last times work. But the story didn't end with her. Her friends still tell it. And here I am telling a version of it right now, to people who never got to sit in that room with her. That's what a good story does. It keeps going without you. Christy told me once that one of the things she fell in love with in high school was the way I told stories. The passion behind them. I didn't think much of it at the time. I was just talking. That's the thing about inheriting something. You don't always know you're carrying it. People have been telling me since I started blogging again that I need to write a book. That my stories make them feel something. I keep thinking about what that means. It's the same thing I've been chasing my whole life on the saxophone. Not to be understood, necessarily, but just to make someone feel something they didn't expect to feel. John Coltrane said it better than I can. "The emotional reaction is all that matters. As long as there's some feeling of communication." That's the same thing I've been reaching for. He also said, "I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once." Something feels urgent, and I start there. Then I find my way back to the beginning and forward to the end at the same time. I thought that was just how my mind worked. But thinking back on my uncle at that kitchen table, and my grandmother giggling through the opossum story for the hundredth time as if it had just happened that morning, they were doing the same thing. Last night, my son Trey played his first official paid gig. He's earned tips sitting in with me at Moody Brews before, but this was different. Someone had hired him. As the bassist. For the night. I've always been proud of my kids. But last night was something else. The band was hitting hard, and Trey was there every step of the way. Never a question of whether he was in the right place or knew what was happening stylistically. He was right there with us. Inside the story we were telling, telling it with us. We hit a lot of emotions throughout the night. Excitement, nostalgia, love, sadness, heartbreak, hope, curiosity. But it wasn't until the last song that it got everyone. We ended with Rainbow Connection. Chris started in on the piano intro, and when I came in on the melody, Trey was there. Clear and confident. I could feel it. We were matching emotions. Christy cried. The entire room could feel it. In that moment, we disappeared into the story we were telling together, and nobody was performing anything. We were just inside it. I've played that song countless times. It never gets old. I think that's what we do. We start where the feeling is. And when we get there, we aren't performing a memory. We're back inside it, pulling you in with us. The same way my dad would watch people taste his food. Eyes on their face, waiting, like he was tasting it all over again right along with them.
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It rained tonight, but not before we got in our first set. By the time Chris and I set up at Moody Brews, the air had that thick, wet asphalt smell that only comes before a June rain in Arkansas. Heavy and humid, but still a good night for music. Trey was set up early and ready.
We played a tune I had never played before. It's called "To Be a Kid," and it's the second track on a suite Chris wrote with his wife, Kelley Hurt, a few years back. The No Tears Suite. They wrote it to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine, nine Black high school students who bravely walked through the doors of Little Rock Central High School in the fall of 1957 while the entire world watched and the Arkansas National Guard tried to stop them. Chris said they just wanted to put the spotlight on those kids. That's all. I was in the audience the night the suite premiered at the historic grounds of Central High School in Little Rock, and I remember how the music felt in that space, like it was waiting to be played there. Kelley's voice over Chris's piano. It made you understand why people make music at all. The sheer talent level on that stage. The ensemble included GRAMMY-winning drummer Brian Blade, Rufus Reid on bass, Bobby LaVell on tenor saxophone, Marc Franklin on trumpet, and Chad Fowler on baritone and alto saxophone. I didn't know then that I would be playing it myself one day on a Friday night at a brewery a few miles away. I didn't know my son would be learning it too. My grandmother, Mamie Ruth, was there in 1957 with my uncle Finley and aunt Ruth. Uncle Finley and Trey share a birthday. August 28th. He was born in 1952, and my son was born in 2011. That would have made my uncle five at the time, with my aunt not even being one yet, still in a stroller. My grandmother was deeply involved in the civil rights movement, and that morning, she was outside that building in support of those nine kids. She graduated from that school herself, back before it was called Central, when it was still called Little Rock High. Most of my aunts and uncles on both sides went there. It was just what you did in this family, in this city. I was supposed to go there too, back in 1998. But Rex Perry recruited me to Parkview instead, and that detour changed everything about who I became as a musician. I remember touring Central during my 9th-grade year. My mom and I walked the halls. You could feel the history. I’d heard stories my whole life about it. It felt like destiny. But when we made it to the band room, something felt off. Music was the most important thing to me at that point in my life, and Parkview felt like home to me. I've thought about that fork in the road more times than I can count. My son Trey starts at Central High this fall. The man who taught me to play saxophone was named Bob Fletcher. He gave me private lessons, not in a band room full of students, just the two of us, one on one. He taught my mom and dad as their band director at Central High. And before any of that, he sat in the same band room at Little Rock High and played clarinet next to my grandfather, who played trumpet. The same grandfather I only know from a memory of a hospital bed. Bob Fletcher had such an impact on my family's musical journey. My first band experience was at a Central High football game. My parents took me so that I could meet Mr. Fletcher. He held me in his arms while he conducted. It wasn’t until I was in college that he ever even mentioned to me that he knew my grandfather. My junior high band director was also named Mr. Fletcher. That's not a typo. Two different men. The second, Danny Fletcher, gave me my first professional gig, subbing for him with the Four Tops. Yeah, the actual Four Tops. Around the same age as Trey is right now. Little Rock may be the capital city of Arkansas, but it still feels like a small town. You turn over a pebble and find your whole history underneath it. The same buildings keep appearing. The same names. The bloodlines running through the music program and the civil rights movement, and a Friday night set at a brewery where the air still smells like rain. Tonight we played "To Be a Kid." Trey is learning it, and it’s not lost on me that this fall, he walks into Central High School. The same building my grandmother stood outside in 1957 in support of nine brave kids. The same school I was supposed to attend, but didn't. The music Chris wrote to honor those nine kids turns out to have my family running all the way through it, in ways none of us planned. We ended up opening the bay doors and playing in the room where we hid our gear from the rain. The crowd that filled the courtyard huddled together under the shelter of the back patio of the brewery. The rain was just enough to knock the temperature down a little, and there was a nice breeze. That's the thing about living in a place like Little Rock long enough. The ordinary just keeps turning into something else. Even if it smells like wet asphalt. I dropped my son off at his summer strings camp at the symphony space, then drove home. I made some coffee and picked up my alto sax to play for a few minutes. My daughter was still asleep, and my next student lesson wasn't for a couple of hours, so I went downstairs to keep the sound down for her.
Just me and the horn. No plan today. I started with a low D and let the note open up. For the first time in a while, I realized how much my tone has improved. When I first started working on my alto tone, I hated the way I sounded. I thought maybe I had too-stiff reeds or the wrong mouthpiece style. I thought it was just the way my mouth was shaped. I thought maybe some players just "had it" and I didn't. I remember playing long tones as a young 7th grader and getting frustrated because the sound in my head and the sound coming out of the horn were miles apart. It felt like I was doing everything right, but still getting that thin, uncertain tone that didn't feel like me at all. If I were going to teach students how to play the saxophone, I would need a way to explain how to produce a good tone. And it wasn't until I broke down how tone really works into smaller parts that things started to click. Airflow. Breath support. Embouchure strength. Once I understood those three things, the tone started changing. Not all at once. But gradually. Slowly. Almost without me noticing. Until mornings like today. Moments where you stop and think, "I'm finally sounding like an alto player." I know that feeling of being stuck with your tone. I know how discouraging it is when you hear other players with that full, rich, confident sound and you think, "Why can't I get that?" You can. You absolutely can. You just need to take your time and focus. Good tone on the saxophone comes down to three main things working together. Those three things are your air, your embouchure, and how you practice. None of them exists in isolation. When one is off, the others feel it, but when they are all working together, the horn stops fighting you. The saxophone is a wind instrument. A tube you blow air through and make longer or shorter to change the pitch. It starts with the air column you're sending through it. Most players who struggle with tone are actually struggling with air. There's a difference between airflow and breath support. Airflow is the amount and speed of air moving through the horn. Breath support is the sustained, controlled pressure behind it. The muscle engagement in your diaphragm and core that keeps the air column steady. Think of it this way: airflow is the river, and breath support is the banks that keep it moving in one direction. A common mistake is just blowing hard without supporting. That gives you a loud, unfocused sound. Another common mistake is supporting without enough airflow. That gives you a tight, pinched tone that feels like you’re fighting to get the sound out. What you want is a warm, fast, steady stream of air. Not forced. Not timid. Directional. A simple exercise to try before you even pick up the horn is to practice blowing a slow, steady stream of air at the back of your hand. Feel the warmth. Feel the consistency. Now speed it up without losing that steadiness. That's the air your saxophone wants. Your embouchure is the way your mouth forms around the mouthpiece. It's one of the most personal things in saxophone playing. Two players can use the same setup and develop completely different tones based on embouchure alone. But there are fundamentals. The corners of your mouth should be firm, not tight. Think of the word "hmm." That slight firmness at the sides without clenching. Your bottom lip rests lightly over your bottom teeth, cushioning the reed. The top teeth rest on the mouthpiece, usually about a half inch to an inch from the tip. Your jaw should be relaxed and slightly forward, not pulled back. Notice I used the word “rest.” What you're after is a seal that controls the reed without squeezing it to death. The reed needs to vibrate freely. If your embouchure is too tight, you kill the vibration and get that thin, strangled tone. If it's too loose, you lose focus and pitch control. My favorite way to think of it is to imagine you're holding a potato chip in your lips without breaking it. Enough pressure to hold it, not enough to crush it. I do love potato chips. When you first start developing your embouchure, your face will get tired fast. That's normal. It's a muscle. It needs time to build. I can’t stress this enough. Don't try to push through it with bad form. Stop, rest, come back. All of this means nothing without consistent, intentional practice. One that actually builds tone Long tones first. Every single day. This is non-negotiable if you want to improve your sound. Long tones are the foundation. Start on a middle note like middle D or Eb, and hold it for as long as you can with a full, steady tone. Listen carefully. Is the pitch drifting? Is the tone thinning out as your air runs down? Is there a wobble? Don't just hold the note. Hear it. Feel it. Adjust. Move chromatically down toward low Bb, then back up. Five to ten minutes of honest long tones will do more for your tone than an hour of running scales. Overtone exercises. This is the secret sauce. Overtones are the harmonics present in every note you play. They're what give great players that rich, full sound. You can develop them intentionally. Start on low Bb. Without changing your fingering, use your air and embouchure to coax the next harmonic out of the horn, a middle Bb. Then the F above it. Then the next Bb. You may not get all of them at first. That's fine. The attempt is training your embouchure and air to work together in ways they won't get from just playing scales alone. Slow, focused scales. Not fast ones. Speed comes later. Right now, you're listening. Play your scales slowly enough that you can hear every note fully before you move to the next one. Is the tone consistent from note to note? Does the character of the sound change as you move into the upper register? These are the questions that build awareness, and awareness is what builds tone. Record yourself. I say this to every student, and most of them resist it. Do it anyway. The sound in your head is not the sound coming out of the horn. Recording is the only honest mirror you have. Listen back objectively. Note where the tone is strong and where it falls apart. Then go after those spots. Be patient. I want to say this simply because I wish someone had said it to me. Tone development is slow. It is genuinely, frustratingly slow. But it is also cumulative. Every long tone session, every overtone exercise, every careful, slow scale, is all going in. You may not notice it day to day. But one morning you'll sit down, play a low D, and something will have changed. That's the morning you've been working toward. There's a reason I still practice tone even after all these years of playing. The instrument always has more to give. There’s always something to work on. That's what keeps it interesting. If you're a student working on your sound, keep going. If you're an educator looking for ways to frame this for your own students, I hope something here was useful. And if you're a player who just sat down this morning with no warm-up and no plan, and you heard something in your tone that made you stop and smile? That one's yours. 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.  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. |
AuthorDave Williams II Archives
July 2026
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