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I’m a tad late posting today because I was up quite late last night digging through some old computer files.  I’ve been cleaning out my Drawer of Forgotten Technology, and stumbled upon my old SanDisk Sansa c250 MP3 player (which I am currently selling on eBay, if anyone wants it).  The battery doesn’t hold a charge, but it will play when connected to power directly via its USB cable connected to any charging block that accepts USB.  Even more intriguing is that it will interface with a PC when that same cable is connected to a USB port.

I uncovered a treasure-trove of music, basically the stuff I listened to in college and graduate school.  Among the random bits of novelty music and 80s hair metal I found a track from long-forgotten musical project, Säx.

Säx was my first attempt at recording anything solo.  I’d composed a number of saxophone quartet compositions specifically for me to record them.  Each piece consisted of two alto sax and two tenor sax parts, and ran the gamut from blues to gospel to rock to circus music—pretty much anything I could think of to demonstrate my composing skills.

I recorded Säx in 2004 at a friend’s house.  He was learning audio engineering at the time (and I believe he now does it for a living), so he was willing to record me and mix my tracks for free so he could get the experience.  We were both 19 at the time, and home from our first year of college, and it was a period in my life when everything seemed possible.

To put things into perspective, this pre-dated YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, etc.  Getting music out there still pretty much meant burning CDs on your computer, then distributing those in jewel cases with homemade art to your friends and family.  You could get them done professionally, but as possible as everything seemed at 19, yours portly didn’t have the money to make everything possible.

Säx was fun, though.  I remember my buddy and I in his little attic space, which he had refurbished into a tiny recording studio, figuring out how to get the click tracks at the right tempo.  There was one piece, an Irish jig in 6/8 time, that I just could not get down, so we axed it entirely (I love 6/8, but back then, I struggled with figuring out whether to set the metronome to duple or sextuple, something that seems laughably embarrassing to me now).

These recordings are not great, with the exception of “Middle Class White Kid Blues,” which actually came out pretty nicely:

The other recordings are a pretty good example of my composing chops at the time (which, I think, were not that bad; I can definitely hear my influences in these pieces, and composing elements I still use to this day, nearly twenty years later).  My playing is often sloppy, with lots of intonation and pitching issues.  Some of the examples are really bad—I end one of the pieces on what should be a beautiful chord, but it’s nasty thanks to bad tuning and intonation.  But it’s still fun—albeit a bit cringe-inducing—to go back and listen to these pieces.

I’ll be re-releasing Säx at some point on Bandcamp and, ultimately, various streaming platforms, just for the completionists out there who want to hear everything I have ever recorded (I also uncovered some other synthesizer pieces I played and recorded in college under two project names, “Blasphemy’s Belt” and “Fat Guy in Boxer Shorts”; I’ll be releasing those pieces at a future date, too).

For now, my faithful paying subscribers are going to have access to all seven Säx tracks in existence—whether you like it or not!  Enjoy this glimpse into some of my earliest recordings.

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