Piece Description

This piece is a retrospective look at the friendship between myself and an elderly gentleman named Joe. Everyone thought of Joe as just another grumpy old man, but in time, he learned to have fun again in life. He was an avid blues and jazz fan, and although he owned an old tenor saxophone, he never learned how to really play the instrument. He wanted to learn to "improvise" like his sax heros, and thus began our adventures together as I tried to teach Joe how to play without reading notes. The whole story has a backdrop of amatuer recordings made by Joe over the course of nearly ten years of weekly jamm sessions between myself and the old man. It's a story about friendship with no age barrier and I suppose the morale could be "It's never too late to learn something new."