Episode Transcript
Introduction
Hello and welcome to the Clarinet Ninja Podcast. My name is Jay Hassler. As always, I'm doing my best to bring you the finest in clarinet information and entertainment. Thanks once again to Mr. James Danderfer for playing us in. I heard through the grapevine that James has some brand new things coming out, and I would love it if you went down into the show notes and clicked on James's links to check out what he's up to. He's making some really great music on the best instrument that I know.
Today we're checking out a bit of my own history. This is a very personal little episode, and I'm going to try to keep it short. It's about my relationship with an incredible woodwind doubler, primarily a saxophonist and flutist, named Gary Foster. Gary lived in Los Angeles. He moved there in the early '60s. He passed away in May of 2026. It's October of 2026 as I record this, so it's been a few months. He died one day short, I think, of being 90.
I studied jazz alto with Gary. I don't talk a lot about studying saxophone on this channel, but he said some things to me that really influenced how I approach everything I do, everything in my life. I think anybody who's graduated from high school has had somebody impart some wisdom on them. And it continues in most people's lives, particularly musicians who are studying with someone who's a specialist at something.
As I talk about this, what I would love for you to do, and I mean this, is think about something somebody said to you that meant something in one moment, that you lived with for years, particularly if you're an old person like me, and what it means to you now. How did it shape you? How did it change you? We all hear things all the time and think, "Oh, that's a cool idea." But these ended up, for whatever reason, being more than a cool idea for me. They became guiding principles, if you will.
This is all in retrospect. It was when he passed away that I recognized how much influence he'd had on my life, because I've got to tell you, jazz alto plays no role in my life, and that's what we worked on. So my immediate thought was, well, not that much happened there, because I didn't pursue what we were actually studying. But check these ideas out.
1. Without Hope and Without Despair
Here's idea number one. We were packing up, saying goodbye for the day. I studied with him for about four years, maybe five. He was a big part of my life. I was not a big part of his life. I probably hadn't talked to him for 20 years before he passed away. When I first moved to New York, we wrote letters back and forth. I would write him a letter, and he would write back an elegant letter in fancy penmanship with a fountain pen. Really amazing stuff. A really generous person with his time and his spirit.
He said this to me as we were packing up our saxophones. It's a quote from an author named Isak Dinesen. Isak Dinesen is the pen name of a woman named Karen Blixen, who wrote Out of Africa, along with a whole bunch of really great short fiction that I read a lot of around the time Gary and I had this conversation. A terrific and thought-provoking writer.
Gary says that in Isak Dinesen's autobiography she wrote, and I'm paraphrasing him paraphrasing her, so it's a little loose, but the idea is this: "The secret to accomplishing a seemingly impossible task is to work every day without hope and without despair."
That hit me solidly in my early twenties, mid-twenties maybe. You get the point. I didn't realize then what it would mean across a lifetime: studying music and studying life, then pursuing a career in music, a career in teaching, and my life's passion as a dad. Every day, without hope and without despair. Because, as Nike has famously said, just do it. So much of our life, there isn't time to get bogged down hoping something's going to work out or being in despair because you think it won't, or it seems like it didn't. Those aren't real things. Some of what I thought were the worst things in my life turned out to be the best things in my life. I just didn't notice it at the time. I couldn't notice it at the time.
As I've built what I would stand by as a successful set of things in my life, it really struck me how that idea took hold. There are lots of ways people talk about this, scientific ways and philosophical ways, but this particular way of saying it stuck. It could be because I was getting it from somebody who'd been on over 500 movie soundtracks, who was incredible at doing the things I wanted to do. That could have a lot to do with why it hit me the way it did and why it stayed with me.
That's one of the beautiful things about studying music, to go on a little tangent. You spend time with people who have worked very, very hard at a specific thing, and they have ideas and life habits beyond that thing. If you watch what they do and how they do it, you get a sense of the intent behind it and who they are as a person. It becomes a real life lesson in how to do something way bigger than playing the clarinet or jazz alto or the flute, whatever anybody is working on.
2. Know Who You Are
The second thing Gary said caught me a little off guard when I was reflecting a few months ago. We were packing up instruments again, and I saw a metal alto saxophone mouthpiece in his case. I said, "When do you use that?" Because Gary was a jazz player. He wasn't a pop player. He didn't play smooth jazz. He was a real jazz guy.
Some setup, since we're a clarinet podcast: a metal mouthpiece was for playing rock or pop music, particularly at that time, and this particular mouthpiece was popularized by a player who was the sound of the pop saxophone solo. So it's for something Gary doesn't self-identify as.
And he tells me, "When people want a real jazz alto sound, they call me. That's what I do. But occasionally I'll get a phone call and somebody wants me to come in and play over a pop song or a rock and roll song, and I tell them I'm not the right guy. On occasion they insist. So I go to the gig, I take this metal Dukoff out of my case, I put it on, and I prove to them that they hired the wrong guy."
That's a very confident statement. I'll tell somebody what I can't do, and if they insist they still want me to do it, I'll go do it and show them. That's an articulation of confidence and of knowing who you are so strongly.
Over the course of trying to build a career in music, trying to play the clarinet in as many styles as I could, I came to recognize something. For a while I was trying to play the saxophone very seriously. I still play it, and pretty well, but I'm not pursuing it that way. Same thing with the flute. It took me some time to recognize who I am and what it is that I do, because there were more things I wanted to do than I was actually good at or had the time to cultivate.
Over time I've really narrowed it down to what I do now. I play clarinet in a very particular way. I can do a lot of different styles, but what I say I really do is play classical clarinet. I can play in a jazz style. I can't really play jazz. I can play in a klezmer style. I can't really play klezmer. I have the flexibility to do those things, but I would never say that's what I do. It's an important distinction.
As a teacher, I teach a lot of kids in the context of a school. I've got to put on that suit and go do that thing, and I'm still perfecting it. I've certainly gotten a lot better at it over my career, and I love doing it. Then there's the Clarinet Ninja Dojo, which I think you've heard of. That's another place where I've had to figure out exactly how I do this thing. And I'm not even mentioning the most important one, being a parent. How is it that I am a parent?
There are things that are uniquely me that I bring to all of those things. I'm not doing exactly the same thing in each, but I approach each one without hope and without despair. There's what you're doing, and there's who you are and what you can specialize in, and that can be limited. As a clarinetist, it's very difficult to sound like a New Orleans jazz clarinet player and also sound like a principal clarinet player in an orchestra. That's a wild amount of flexibility on an instrument that requires something very specific from you to get that outcome.
As a teacher, it's a little easier to cast a wider net. As a parent, you have to parent the way you parent. That's the best way to go about it. We're all going to self-evaluate. Is this what I hated most about my dad? Don't get me started on that. It's complicated. I think my dad did the best he could.
But my point is this: you've got to know who you are and what you're doing. That informs what you practice and how you get there, under the framework of working without hope and without despair.
3. "Why Do You Insist on Being Such an Underachiever?"
The last thing broke my heart when he said it, but it might be the most influential thing anyone's ever said to me.
Bear in mind, at this point I'm your standard arrogant 22- or 23-year-old who's got the world where he wants it, in his own mind, and is going to go out there and make his name in the music world. And Gary looked at me and said, and this is exactly how he said it: "Jay, I don't know why you insist on being such an underachiever."
At the time it was a knife to the heart. I drove home from Alhambra, where he was, to Long Beach, where I was, in my '83 Corolla, mad and hurt. But I also had this other, very strange idea. This is how Gary did things, and it was really amazing. He didn't say I wasn't good or that I wasn't achieving things. He said I insist on being an underachiever.
Who he was judging me against was the version of me he saw was possible. He wasn't judging me against the world. He wasn't judging me against a professional. He was saying: wherever you are now is not where you could be if you applied yourself 100 percent.
Over the years that's become something I've thought about a lot. What matters is that we bring our best self to our practice, knowing who we want to be, without hope and without despair. And that we find a way to assess ourselves fairly, which is against what we know we can do. That level of brutal honesty with oneself is difficult to reckon with, because we all tend to judge what we're doing against what everyone else is doing. That's not the right way to go about it.
I've got to be honest, the way Gary said that crippled me for a long time. A very well-known and important person in my world called me an underachiever. So for years I thought I had to work as hard as I could not to be an underachiever, and I probably achieved that long before I gave myself credit for it. That's a whole other thing I'll talk to my psychiatrist about. But it's interesting how somebody says something to us and it gets hold of us and really impacts us.
I don't think Gary meant to do any of that. I think he was making a comment that was true, one he knew I wasn't hearing from anybody else. In his mind, he was there to tell me the truth as he saw it. And I think that's how he saw all of his students, not just me.
He wasn't so much a teacher as somebody who gave information out. That's how I see it now, as somebody who's spent a lot of time teaching and learning teaching techniques, learning styles, scaffolding, all that. I don't think he had his mind on that, and he didn't need to. I don't think it would have helped, because he had students coming to him who were dying to learn from him and excited to spend time with him, which I certainly was.
It's only in the past few years that I've recognized I am not an underachiever anymore. I maybe haven't achieved everything I want in my life. That doesn't make any of us an underachiever. But I know that what I'm doing now is my honest best effort.
What We Do With What We're Given
When I look back on all this, Gary inadvertently gave me, in conversation over a number of years, some big umbrella ideas. Inadvertent in the sense that he didn't have a master plan. How to go about learning something. How to refine what it is you're trying to learn as specifically as you can. And how to assess whether you're doing it or not.
What he said didn't give me the tools to do those things. I had to bring that myself. I think that's important for all of us to think about. Not everyone's going to give you everything. Some people will give you tools. Some will give you the idea. Some will give you the motivation, or any combination of those and more. But how do we take those things and make them into who we are?
When Gary passed away, a lot came back to me: things he said, how they stayed with me for years, how they shaped who I am and my commitment. Not only my commitment, but what that commitment looks like on the inside to me, the only person who can see it, and how it shows up in what I'm producing, what I'm doing, and the outcomes I'm achieving in my life.
Your Turn
So again, please, whether you're 18 and you just heard some cool stuff, or you're 70 and somebody told you something 50 years ago that you've lived with, I'd love to hear about it. I'd love to know what has shaped you and how you've carried it with you. We carry these things through our lives, and it's up to us to make something out of them. I'm not alone in having amazing people say things to me that impacted my life this way. I want to know about your experience.
That's what I've got this week. Go check out Gary Foster. I'm going to say this: the best jazz album you've never heard is Concord Duo Series, Volume Four by Alan Broadbent and Gary Foster, live at Maybeck Recital Hall. Go check it out. As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the most objectively and subjectively beautiful things I've ever heard in my life. If you've heard it, share your feelings about it. Maybe you're not as nuts about it as I am, but I think it's a great album.
Thanks for being here at the Clarinet Ninja Podcast. It means a lot to me that you're checking it out. Check out James Danderfer. And check out the Clarinet Ninja Dojo, because not only do I have big ideas like this, I've got specific exercises to make you better at the clarinet if you're a grown-up. This is totally different from what we did as kids. I teach kids at school and I teach adults everywhere else, and I don't teach the same thing, because you're not the same.
I'll see you here, there, anywhere. If you see me walking down the street, say hello. I love you. Talk to you later. Bye.
