Jazz Anecdote

Anecdote Paper

Being a Musician reading this book wasn't just normal reading for me. It kind of brought back a lot of the feelings I had when I played. I played the saxophone and was actually in a Jazz Band which was fun while it lasted. When combing through the pages I came across two sections that seemed to make a lot of sense in the Music world. The first one was chapter 6, Teachers and Students.

When I signed up for band I knew it wasn't going to be easy to learn to play an instrument but I was willing to give it a shot. I walked into the room on the first day and saw all our instruments pushed to the side and our teacher told us all to have a seat and not to touch our instruments. I was wondering why they weren't set up and why we weren't getting ready to play. He wanted us all to get to know each other first. He said "We are not a bunch of single instruments, we are ONE band." From that day on we all got to know each other very well and became sort of a family. We didn't actually pick up our instruments on that day but the sounds of everybody talking and learning from one another was just like music.

I learned a lot of things from my teacher, some musical and some not. Music isn't just sounds coming from an instrument. Music can teach you a lesson. You can feel what a person is feeling just from their music. You can tell what they are thinking from the style they are playing in. All these things were just as the base of music. Music is like a language but its not easily understood. You really have to work in order to understand it and being a student allowed me to learn it and I wouldn't trade one second of it for anything else.

The Second thing was in chapter 7, Stage Fright. When I got up on stage to perform 95% of the time I was scared out of my mind. Would I hit the right note? Would I play with the right timing? Was my reed wet enough? Was it too Wet? All these questions were the ones racing through my mind right before I was supposed to