Gary Foster died in May. He was one day short of his 90th birthday.

If you don’t know the name, Gary was a woodwind doubler in Los Angeles. He was mostly known as a jazz alto saxophone player but played incredible clarinet and flute as well, and he was on more than 500 film soundtracks. I studied jazz alto with him for four or five years in my early twenties.

Jazz alto plays no role in my life today. When I heard he’d passed, my first thought was that maybe not much came out of those lessons, since I never pursued what we were working on. Then I started remembering things he said. They weren’t just about the saxophone. They were things he said while we were packing up our cases. Three of them stuck so hard that they ended up shaping pretty much everything I do.

1. Work every day without hope and without despair

One afternoon Gary paraphrased a line from Isak Dinesen, the pen name of Karen Blixen, who wrote Out of Africa. The idea went like this: the secret to accomplishing a seemingly impossible task is to work every day, without hope and without despair.

I was in my mid-twenties and it hit me hard. I’ve had about thirty years since then to figure out what it means, through a music career, a teaching career, and raising my daughter.

Hope and despair both pull you away from the work. Either you’re picturing it going great or you’re picturing it falling apart, and neither one has happened yet. Some of the things I thought were the worst in my life turned out to be the best. I couldn’t see that while they were happening. Nobody can.

So you show up and do the work. That’s it.

2. Know who you are (and what you don’t do)

Once I noticed a metal Dukoff mouthpiece in Gary’s case. That’s the setup for a bright pop or rock sax sound, and Gary was a real jazz player. No smooth jazz, no pop. So I asked him when he ever used it.

He said when people wanted a real jazz alto sound, they called him. Every so often someone would call wanting him to play over a pop or rock tune, and he’d tell them he wasn’t the right guy. Sometimes they insisted. So he’d go to the gig, put the Dukoff on, and prove to them they’d hired the wrong guy.

I laughed. Years later I understood it as a kind of confidence I didn’t have yet. He knew exactly what he did and what he didn’t do, and he had no problem saying so.

It took me a long time to get there. For a while I was seriously chasing saxophone and flute alongside clarinet, and I wanted to play every style out there. Here’s where I landed. I can play in a jazz style, but I can’t really play jazz. I can play in a klezmer style, but I can’t really play klezmer. What I do is play classical clarinet. That distinction matters, and making it has let me put my time where it counts.

For clarinetists, this is a big deal. Sounding like a New Orleans player and sounding like an orchestra principal are two very different targets, and each asks something specific of you. Knowing which one you’re after tells you what to practice.

The same goes outside the practice room. Teaching kids at school is one suit I put on. Teaching adults in the Clarinet Ninja Dojo is another. Being a dad is something else entirely. Each asks for something different, and each gets the parts of me that are uniquely mine.

3. “I don’t understand why you insist on being such an underachiever”

This one broke my heart.

I was 22 or 23, and like a lot of people that age, I figured I had the world right where I wanted it. Then Gary looked at me and said, “Jay, I don’t understand why you insist on being such an underachiever.”

I drove home from Alhambra to Long Beach in my ‘83 Corolla, mad and hurt. But something else nagged at me on that drive. He didn’t say I wasn’t good. He didn’t say I wasn’t getting anywhere. He said I insisted on underachieving. He was measuring me against the version of me he could see was possible. He wasn’t comparing me to the world or to other professionals.

That’s the fairest measuring stick there is, and the hardest one to use. Most of us judge ourselves against whatever everyone around us is doing. Gary’s standard was what you know you could do if you gave it everything.

I’ll be honest. That comment hung over me for a long time. For years I worked as hard as I could not to be an underachiever, and I probably got there long before I gave myself credit for it. I don’t think Gary meant any of that. I think he was telling me the truth as he saw it, because he knew nobody else was going to.

Only in the last few years have I been able to say I’m not an underachiever anymore. I haven’t done everything I want to do. But what I’m doing now is my honest best effort.

What you do with what people give you

Gary wasn’t really a teacher the way I think about teaching now. No scaffolding, no learning styles. He didn’t need any of that. His students were dying to be in the room with him, and I was one of them. What he gave me were big umbrella ideas: how to keep going, how to get specific about what you’re trying to learn, and how to tell honestly whether you’re getting there.

He didn’t hand me the tools to do those things. I had to build them myself. Some people give you tools. Some give you an idea. Some give you motivation. It’s on us to turn that into who we are.

Your turn

Think of something someone said to you that stuck. Maybe it was last week, maybe it was fifty years ago. What did it mean then? What does it mean now? How did it change you?

Leave a comment and tell me. I really want to know.

One album to hear

Go listen to Gary. My pick is Concord Duo Series, Volume Four by Alan Broadbent and Gary Foster, recorded live at Maybeck Recital Hall. It’s the best jazz album you’ve never heard, and to me it’s one of the most beautiful recordings ever made. If you know it, tell me what you think.

And if you’re an adult clarinetist who wants specific exercises to go with the big ideas, come check out the Clarinet Ninja Dojo.