Lessons from musicians

"You must keep playing music,” Rubinstein told a packed hall. “When people get old, sometimes they become sad, and the only thing that can solace them is music. So you must keep playing music.”

Another master

I studied saxophone and clarinet with Joe Allard at the Manhattan School of Music, in the old Juilliard building on the Upper West Side. Joe was the greatest teacher I ever had, or met, or could dream of.

Joe’s hero was Socrates, because Socrates began each lesson by asking his students, or a visiting philosopher, what they knew, then demonstrated that they did not know what they were talking about.

Joe played bass clarinet with Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra back in the 1940s, and on breaks he’d run across the street to listen to Charlie Parker.

Horn players called Joe the saxophone psychiatrist, because when they had a problem they couldn’t lick, they sought his help. John Coltrane did; so did Stan Getz, Eddie Daniels, Michael Brecker, Eric Dolphy, Dave Liebman and Harry Carney. Joe also coached the saxophone sections in Glenn Miller’s and Benny Goodman’s big bands.

At no time in my presence did Joe ever claim any credit for any of his students. To hear Joe tell it, he’d just helped them out a bit, after they’d asked.

In my two years with Joe, I never heard him say an unkind word about anyone.

What Joe taught me

I took my first lessons with Joe in his studio at 154 W. 7^th St. As I left my lesson every week that year, happy and charged up, lusting to practice, I saw Gato Barbieri hustling past me the other way, toward Carnegie Hall, a minute late for his lesson.

Toward the end of my two years' study with Joe, I asked him how he taught — not probing for secrets, I just wanted to know how he thought about music and teaching.

Joe told me that on a usual first lesson, he’d ask a student to play for him, and he’d watch, and listen, and try to “get into the student’s head,” to try to see what habits the student had that were interfering with what he or she was trying to express. Then, Joe said, he “tried to remove the habits they had acquired that interfered with it.”

That’s why you should never try to imitate anyone, Joe said, because your hero might have developed his style because of a bad habit he never knew he had — and that you don’t have, yet.

We all develop habits as we live our lives. Some are adjustments to problems we have, some to problems we don’t want to admit; sometimes we don’t even know we have the habit or have made adjustments to it.

In the sad state of our country today, let’s remember what Joe said, and try to remove the habits we have developed, as a country, that are interfering with what we say we want.

Here is a Question & Answer section, for which I made up the A’s and the Q’s. (Actually, I didn’t make up the Q's. They already had made themselves up.)

Q: Did Joe Allard or Artur Rubinstein ever do harm to strangers?

A: Not that I know.

Q: Did Joe or Artur ever beat their breasts and brag about how great they were?

A: No.

Q: If they did brag about themselves, would it have made any difference to the history of the world?

A: No.

Q: Would it have made them any better or worse?

A: No. Well, maybe a bit worse.

Q: After they perfected their art, how did they use it?

A: Well, Rubinstein brought joy to people; Joe helped his students bring music to people.

Q: How does this lesson apply to the state of our nation, and our so-called leaders?

A: See St. Paul’s Third Pastoral Epistle, Titus 1:15: "To the pure, all things are pure, while a corrupt mind sees nothing but corruption everywhere.”

(For musicians, here is a link to excerpts from Debra Jean McKim’s Ph.D. dissertation on Joe’s “Contributions to Saxophone Pedagogy and Performance,” (University of Northern Colorado, 2000.) Efforts to contact McKim were unavailing; this excerpt is available on the internet.)