How Shannon Kennedy started playing Saxophone
by Shannon Kennedy
The way I came about playing the saxophone is quite unusual - it was
completed by accident, but I cannot imagine my life without it.
It all started in the junior high when at the beginning of school they give
you a form to take home and decide which instrument you wanted to play.
Initially, we were given the option to continue doing theatre or join the
band, and having done theatre for seven years already at the time, I felt I
needed a change.
So, I took the form home. I had an uncle who played the trumpet, and I
wanted to play the same instrument as he did so that I could have
someone around who could help me out when I needed it. But at the time, I
was convinced that the trumpet was called the flute, and despite my
parents telling me otherwise, I wrote "Flute" down on the form.
The next week at school, they had rented all the instruments and were
handing them out to us. When they called my name, I walked down and
they handed me a thin, long box. I opened it and looked at the instrument
they gave me. They asked me if it was what I wanted to play, and I said
"No", but they told me that I couldn't switch instruments because they had
only rented instruments according to what the students had written down.
I went home pretty disappointed that day.
All throughout junior high, I wanted to play in the jazz band, but they
wouldn't let me because I played flute. I saw that some of the music they
played had flute parts, but I was told that was only for "advanced" jazz
bands, and ours wasn't good enough yet. I insisted on sitting in at
rehearsals, transposing the sax parts.
After I graduated from the junior high, my parents told me that they would
let me start to play trumpet or saxophone so that I could play in the high
school jazz band. Obviously I chose the trumpet, so we went down to the
music store to rent a trumpet that I could learn over the summer.
When we got to the store, the guy went into the back to look for a
trumpet. He came back saying that he had already rented out all his
trumpets and all he had left was an alto saxophone. I was determined to
play in the jazz band, so I gave into getting a saxophone.
Eventually, my sophomore year in high school, my grandfather gave me his
60 year old Getzen trumpet. I started to learn it, and I got pretty good at
it. When I told my band director, who is a trumpet player, that I had
started to play and wanted to audition with it, he laughed at me. He told
me girls never became good trumpet players, and that I would never be
able to make a career playing trumpet - that it would be hard enough to
ever become good being a girl on sax. This really discouraged me and I
decided that I needed to choose between sax and trumpet so I could prove
to him that a girl could get good on one or the other. I ended up choosing
sax because I ended up liking it better. I didn't keep trumpet as a double
because the buzzing of the mouthpiece was starting to ruin my chops for
sax.
In the end, I have come to realize that I truly love playing the saxophone
and could not imagine my life without it. Since renting an old student
Yamaha alto, I have spread out to playing soprano, alto, tenor and bari
saxes. I think that writing "flute" on that little piece of paper was probably
the best mistake that ever happened to me.
