Stories : Saxophones to Yoga mats

My friend and I had visited a music shop on the Charing Cross road, She'd wanted to play a flute, bored, I asked to try a clarinet. We were killing time waiting for an interview she had that afternoon with Cosmopolitan magazine. Just after we left the shop,  as we crossed the road, I narrowly missed being run over by a car, it was going much too quickly and I'd have most likely been killed outright.

I went Straight back to the music shop and bought the Clarinet.

That was the second Clarinet I'd blown, the first was owned by a Young Sicilian chef called Leo. He'd bought a gun over to England in the instruments case, and used to keep it in his locker. I remember one night I had to stop him from going to get the gun so he could shoot a customer who had complained that there wasn't enough cheese on his pizza.

Leo would teach me the notes while the other chefs smoked outside.

The first saxophone I blew was kept under a lovers bed, she hadn't blown it since her teens but had brought it to University with her in the hope of taking it up again. We took the same philosophy class, Kant. I'd sit naked at the end of her bed blowing the same five bluesy notes from the restaurant, no doubt imaging I was quite the existentialist.

I sold my first saxophone to visit my future wife in Hong Kong after the Drug Research, company wouldn't allow me to join any more studies.

A few years later we popped into a small music shop in Osaka, that had a Tenor saxophone in the window. I blew those same five notes, no doubt it sounded awful but she got that melted look in her eye and lent me the money to buy the saxophone.

In Japan the flats and houses have futon cupboards, I used to sit in ours while teaching myself to play and read music. When the weather became unbearably hot I would cycle down to the river in the early morning to practice, sometimes under bridges or in the portable toilets for the sake of th echo.

We moved to Kyoto a year later beside the Kamo river and for two years, every morning, I would go down to the river, stand under the bridge and practice for two hours. The picture is from the bridge under which I played, rain sleet or snow, cutting the fingers off my gloves in the winter.

Later, when we had a house, I would practice in the mornings as well as the evening, as soon as I got in the doors. My job, training teachers, was something I just did between practice sessions.

We went to New York on holiday but mainly so I could  buy a Selmer's MkVI from Roberto's on 52 street. I'd fantasise about playing nights at the Village Vanguard, like Sonny and Dexter and Coltrane.



I came back to England to become a Woodwind Repairer. I wanted to play all the different vintage saxophones, the King Super 20's, Conn's, Martin Top hats, the Grafron and of course the Selmer's. I figured I'd never be able to afford all those classic saxophones but as a repairer then they might come to me...they did.

Four years ago we were burgled, I had seven saxophones stolen from under my bed including the Mark 6 from New York and the Super 20 I'd restored after it was fished out of the New Orleans floods. It had previously been painted pink and hung on the wall of a New Orleans nightclub.

Five of the saxophones were returned by the police but not the Mk 6, that was sold in a Portobello Market along with my Mk VII tenor for £250.

Annoyed with myself for feeling angry about the theft, a month later I took up Ashtanga yoga.


I've practice almost every day since, often twice but picked up my saxophone perhaps a handful of times.

Last year I sold my rare prized Grafton so I could spend a month in Los Angeles Studying Vinyasa Krama Yoga with Ramaswami.