Oh boy!
When I was a kid I learned jazz guitar with my brother who had a friend - Tal Farlow. I was just a dumbass kid. Little did I know whom I was learning from! Probably the most legendary guitarist in Jazz! Then when I was about 12, my parents thought I should take clarinet lessons. Great! Rented a plastic clarinet and at the instruction of a store teacher blew the first of a hundred million notes - open G.
A clarinet has a certain smell - a faint odor of wood, bore oil, and cork grease that gets into your brain and stays there for life. You also get a callous on the side of your right thumb from the thumb "rest" (in quotes because it's anything but. Clarinets are heavy.)
After I got married I met Lee Konitz. Somehow we became good friends, and I decided to add an alto sax to my menagerie. so I bought an old Selmer Mark VI on 48th Street up the stairs, which has now become valuable. My teacher complained that it was better than his!
Then of course, any woodwind player has to play flute. I studied with Harold Bennett, the 1st flutist of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, and he sold me his own Muramatsu flute - silver, custom made, B foot. It had the darkest sound I had ever heard from a flute. I loved it so much I continued to this day playing classical music - mostly chamber music - all the baroque and pre-romantic cats. You name 'em, I played them.
All this while I was still playing jazz guitar with my Fender Princeton amp, which was then the trade standard. Six tubes, reverb, 12" speaker. Still have it and use it.
Then I lent my Guild guitar to a pal who had his stolen and was playing gigs and needed a guitar fast. One night his girl bass player-cum-vocalist got drunk, knocked it off the stand and stepped through it with high heels. End of Guild. He didn't replace it until years later when he became one of the Four Freshmen and started to get rich. (He told me that the first night with the Freshmen he made more $$ than he'd made the entire previous year!)
One night I went to see the Freshmen at the Rainbow room in NYC and in between shows Bill took me back to the dressing room and gave me a nice Gibson ES 125. I went home from Rockefeller Center with a new jazz guitar better than my old one.
One day after Stan Getz's uncle came in to see me and started telling me stories about his nephew (when Getz was a kid in the Bronx and the neighbors complained about his loud playing, his mother would say, "Play louder, Stanley!") I decided that I had to have a tenor sax. I bought an old Selmer Tenor - what we called a "Balanced Action Selmer" . . . from Manny, at the old upstairs shop on 48th Street again. I didn't know it but they were to become the most cherished horns in the business. Sax men used to telephone me to try to buy it.
So what are my other instruments and which do I like best? I couldn't begin to say. I love, cherish, and play all of them! But none better than my harmonica!
Tom C/Bluesy
