Open The Case

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.