Max Lizee

Coltrane, Miles, Rollins, Bird, and Monk. The first aspiration of any jazz musician is to become a legendary soloist. I picked up tenor saxophone in sixth grade and fell for jazz when my dad played “St. Thomas” from Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus. After establishing whatever noise came out of Rollins’ horn as my favorite, I had to play exactly like him.

As you grow up, you might idolize some stand-out individual: an inventor-turned-billionaire, the genius scientist, a jazz great. I’ve learned the history of rugged individualism and rolled my eyes at celebrity culture, but I understand why that version of success still dominates America: my life has been structured around individual achievement. First chair in the band, the kind of student who sees 94s as disappointments. Heck, I’m an only child, born from two only children! 

Jazz promises something different. It requires responding to music around you, a dialogue between players, a community. But the allure of the soloist is irresistible.

 I began that journey with sax players in Birmingham. Lessons took me to basements with minefields of dirty laundry and Bible-verse-plastered ceilings, run-down apartments saturated with smoke, and an imported food warehouse that smelled like Middle Eastern spices. Following these first lessons, I could improvise my first solos on “Doxy,” a composition by Sonny Rollins.

 But I wanted a teacher who could get more ‘soloist’ out of me. Enter Dwight: a musical perfectionist, a cruel concertmaster. His motivational style involved interrupting me after I played a single note, yelling, “No, no, no, no!” My favorite: “I have second graders who play this better than you!” He wasn’t kidding— those second-graders were pretty good. There was a 50/50 chance that after a lesson, tears would hit the bell on my horn like raindrops landing on a tin roof. Despite the downpours, I returned weekly. He symbolized a path to perfection. 

But that’s what pushed me away from him. Perfectionism sapped the joy from jazz. Rollins no longer made the hair on my arm rise. Still, I thank him. He helped me understand the distinction between being a soloist and playing jazz. 

I don’t want endless journeys of solo perfection, to subscribe to that traditionally American narrative that prizes individual excellence and diminishes collaboration. I want to take part in the jazz dialogue with other musicians, not a competition against Dwight and my longing for a ‘perfect solo.’ I want to draw some boundary between healthy ambition and joyless pursuits of greatness. 

Now I’m part of my school’s Contemporary Music Ensemble, playing on songs from genres that have never heard a sax blow. A solo on Kiss’s “I Was Made for Lovin’ You”? Of course! But thoughts of an imperfect solo made me want to crawl up inside my saxophone, so I patched one together after listening to almost every classic rock saxophone solo, which didn’t take long. 

On concert day, my heart cemented itself in the middle of my throat. I managed to coax out the first note of my scripted solo, but my heart, still stuck, prevented the air from escaping my throat. The first line of the solo managed to slip by; I took a deep breath, blowing images of Dwight’s second graders out through my nose. I threw away the rest of the memorized solo, and my heart finally dislodged itself from my throat. Pieces of it flew through the reed of my saxophone and exited out the bell towards the crowd, which they slowly began to pick up and show back to me. It’s almost like they were reminding me “Hey! This is what jazz looks like!” The front three rows stood up, engulfed by waves of music emanating from our band, and clapped to the beat of my solo. Once all the different pieces of my heart had taken the journey through my saxophone, I finally felt like Rollins. I ended my solo.