The room was foggy with smoke but the music was bright and clear as it zigzagged about the room, this way then that, twisting, spinning, somersaulting over itself, but never losing its way. I was painfully young at the time, and very alone, alienated from everything I could trust that first time I saw Mel on stage. I wondered if I should sit at the bar or a table, second-guessing myself as usual. After all, it had taken a huge amount of nerve to climb on a bus out in Queens, then down the steps to a train, to here, the heart of Greenwich Village, center of all that was cool and hip. Just then Mel spotted me and in a kind of greeting stood and took a solo; his tenor sax swung out in front, his body rocking as his fingers danced over the metal keys. He swayed from side to side, as if in prayer, in time with the notes he sent swirling off into the smoky air, head bobbing, eyes closed tight.
All I wanted, all I had ever wanted, was to see what he was seeing.
The guy behind the bar caught Mel’s glance and without a word poured me a drink. This meant I could, or should, sit at the bar, and I settled onto a shaky barstool as casually as I could. The drink was Scotch, I think, a generous friend-of-the-band amount. It scorched my tongue and burned my throat, hurting like mad, which I assumed was the point, the utter coolness of it.
I didn’t yet know it was the last time I’d see Mel alive.

Mel was my clarinet and saxophone teacher, and we were working on improving me on sax so I could play in his band. Looking back, I realize why that meant so much to me: Mel believed I could do something I didn’t think I could do, play well enough to sit with the pros at a paying gig. At the time I didn’t think I could do anything well, even things I could do, and it felt like everyone around me felt the same.
That last night Mel came off stage to join me at the bar, accepting the drink immediately poured. He greeted me with, “Got your horn?” and was visibly disappointed when I said I hadn’t brought any instrument. The idea of climbing onstage back then to join a real band in a smoky club terrified me. (Actually, it still does). It was just like Mel to assume I had brought an instrument, that I could just waltz up on stage and stand beside him to take a soaring solo as a roomful of sophisticated jazz lovers nod at what I have to say. (That was the question asked about jazz musicians, according to Mel: “Yes, but did he have anything to say?”)
Mel’s opinion of rock, the music everyone I knew was obsessed with, was dismissive. He liked to say, “Rock is three chords listened to by thousands. Jazz is a thousand chords listened to by two or three.” This wasn’t even Mel’s real band, just a group he jammed with at downtown clubs into the wee hours. It wasn’t where he made his money, which was playing “society gigs” like weddings and bar mitzvahs, supplemented with lessons on the side like mine.

By conventional standards, Mel was a terrible teacher. He would show up at my house late, carrying an exotic instrument, like a soprano clarinet or a bass saxophone. He’d play each like it was his “primary instrument,” riffing along as I stumbled through the exercises that comprise most of woodwind practice, or at least at the level I was at. He’d stay far more than the allotted hour, sometimes two or even three. Between my exercises and his riffs he’d lean back, light a cigarette, and tell me tales of the road, of the gigs and the women and the booze and drugs, from his years starting as a teenager when he crisscrossed the country with bands. He told me things you aren’t supposed to tell a teenager, or say out loud to anyone, like playing with the famous jazz names he dropped without a hint of seeking to impress who were smashed on cocaine or even heroin yet played brilliantly, better than they ever had. Of the women who hung out in clubs (and weddings and at least one bar mitzvah) who liked to drink and sleep with musicians. (Mel was married, with two small kids, but that never seemed to enter into the equation.)
The lessons took place in the afternoon at the piano in my living room, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the blond wood bench with no parents around. Mel would back me with a string of playful arpeggios on whatever instrument he brought, or switch to piano, which he played surprisingly well. It was on piano that he showed me flat fives, the flat fifth of the scale that creates the sound we associate with blues (and rock, which stole all its harmonics from jazz, according to Mel), that note that cuts right through you, a kind of wa wa that says it all. Mel showed me how to make an instrument do that, and I’d spend hours at the piano afterward playing C E-flat G-flat in my empty, parent-less house, then in different keys, and then on clarinet or sax, where I could bend the tone by how I blew through the reed to let that flat fifth express, no, say, all the confusion and loneliness I felt.
One day I couldn’t concentrate, which was fine with Mel, who riffed a bit on the huge baritone sax he had brought, lost to me for a few minutes, until he came back to say, “So it’s a girl we’re talking about,” which was essentially a repetition of what he had said in his last spirited improvisation. I told him what had happened, which now I can’t remember at all, but I do recall him shrugging, blowing another riff and saying, “So some chick busted your heart. Pick up your horn and play!”
Meaning: Wail flat fives into the night! Let out your pain. Say it until nothing else matters! The key changes, the hurt changes, but it’s all just flat fives, man!
All that of course would be far too abstract and intellectual for Mel, who never spoke of music in any terms but the music itself, the chords and progressions and rhythms. But the idea stayed with me, and in the years that followed, as I learned there’s far more heartbreak and loss out there than any angst-ridden teenager can imagine, I began to hear that flat fifth not only in music but in my life at those times I felt I had nothing and nowhere to go, heard that cry of pain that feels so damn good to hear, that says no matter how much it hurts the song – your song — is still worth singing.
Those afternoons, sitting with Mel at the piano, stayed with me far longer than Mel would, though at the time I thought him immortal, like all adults. I knew he wasn’t perfect, my parents were not entirely comfortable with him, but I was too young to know just how flawed he was.
It happened after I graduated to a professional-level sax (or convinced my parents to pay for one) and Mel offered to meet us at a legendary music store on West 48th Street in Manhattan to buy a reconditioned instrument, which he insisted was better than a new one if you knew what to look for. Leaning intently over the counter, he pointed to one in a row of shiny saxes and cradled it to check the play of the keys. When he got one he liked he yanked his favorite mouthpiece from his pocket, twisted it in place, licked the reed, and began to wail.
Even knowing Mel as I did I was still astounded that one could do that in a store crowded with professionals. Men around us had been trading tales of crazy gigs, crazy women, and crazy managers; another group was from the pit orchestra of a current smash Broadway musical; a woman next to us was complaining that her flute had not been repaired properly and her conductor had publicly excoriated her (he was apparently notorious for that) about how off key it was.
Mel didn’t like the first saxophone, or the second, or the third, but the fourth felt right, and he wouldn’t stop playing. And as he riffed the place started moving. The woman with the flute – the principal flutist of a world-class orchestra – swayed along as she continued to berate the head of the repair department, snapping her fingers and glancing over at Mel, who was oblivious. Others looked on, nodding along with the kind of approval I would have killed to get anywhere in my life back then. I thought the whole store might join in, sing and dance along as in a movie musical.
That was the world Mel dwelled in, the world he let me glimpse. The one he believed I had earned the right to enter.
News of his death came soon after, relayed by his wife, who called to say my lesson was canceled because Mel had suddenly died. My mother took the call, and by her expression I suspected he might not have died from the heart attack she was told but from another cause, one that either she or Mel’s wife wanted to shield me from to keep him from becoming a bad role model.
I never found out what happened. Like the place from which Mel’s music sprang, it remains a mystery. Years later I searched online but never found a trace of him, as if he or my time with him had never existed.
The sax he picked out that day still sits in a corner of my closet, and I still play it once in a while. And in a certain mood I’ll sit at a piano and tap out a few flat fifths to hear them sing that sweet sad song in hopes of letting out the anguish bottled inside me. And sometimes it even works.