Look...DON'T TOUCH (A Musician's Universal Plea)

[Shenole Latimer]

A couple of weeks ago, I had an experience that has put me on a personal crusade to educate people about musicians and their equipment.

Now first of all, if you are a fan of mine, I hope that you will not take offense to this statement, but people simply don't have a single clue
as to how expensive our equipment is and why nobody, other than the
musician who owns it, should ever bother trying to touch ANY OF IT! So,
with that said, here's what happened a couple of weeks ago.

I was in the auditorium of a library and was setting my gear up because I had one of my educational presentations that I do. It was still at least 30
minutes before the program was suppose to start, and I was pretty much
finished setting up, when two ladies walked in. We then struck up a
conversation. Eventually, the conversation went more towards just one
of the ladies, while the other walked away. Something told me to look
in the direction of the woman who had walked away. And, it's a good
thing that I did! I was horrified to see the second woman proceed to
grab my alto saxophone by the neck in order to pick it up off of the
sax stand that I had it placed on. I immediately started yelling, "no,
no, no!"

I arrived just in time to grab my sax from her before she could fully lift it up. By the time I reached my sax, I was actually fuming mad
because I had just spent $500 getting extensive and much needed work
done on it. At the same time, I was trying to stay polite and in
control of my overall reaction. The lady then told me that she only
wanted to look at it and that she knew what she was doing because her
father had been a musician. Her comment almost made me loose it
because, if she had indeed grown up around a PROFESSIONAL musician,
surely one of the first things she should have learned was DON'T TOUCH.
Besides, he may have dabbled with music, but was he a FULL-TIME,
PROFESSIONAL musician like me? As I always say, "just because you can
screw in a light bulb, it doesn't make you an electrician. "

More to the point of things, it was MY equipment that she was handling and I simply DO NOT LIKE people touching my stuff without my permission.

Still trying to keep my composure, I went on to explain that my sax was not a cheap beginner's model and that I depended on it for my livelihood. I
then politely clued her in that she didn't actually know as much as she
thought she did, because she was about to pick the sax up in the worse
manner that you could possibly pick a saxophone up by. The neck is a
separate piece from the body of the sax and can be very easily
separated, even after applying the screw for the clamp that holds it in
place. In other words, she would have picked the sax up by the neck,
the body of the sax would have detached and fallen on the ground, and I
would have been looking at anywhere between $500 - $1,500 worth of
damage. Experience has taught me that, once an instrument falls to the
ground, it NEVER plays quite the same ever again, no matter how much
money you dump into getting it repaired.

The end result is that I managed to get her to understand the situation.

As for the public at large, people simply have no idea the worth of musician's instruments. Between the 5 saxophones that I own ( 2 altos, 2 sopranos,
and a rare C melody sax), I'm looking at around $23,000. And that's
just my saxophones! If you add up all of the equipment that I own for
the purposes of making my living in music, the grand total is just
under $41,000. Believe it or not, that isn't even on the more expensive
end of things regarding what some professional musicians have spent on
their gear. Todd Coolman, the esteemed bassist who was my first jazz
instructor at Stony Brook University and is currently the head of the
SUNY (State University of New York) at Purchase Jazz Program once
confided in me that his prized bass, which is the one he uses on
important gigs and recording sessions, is worth about $85,000. He uses
a different bass that is worth (I think I remember him saying) about
$12,000 for most of his other gigs.

Anyway, the point of all of this isn't to just give you a tally of how much we spend on our instruments and gear. The simple fact is that you should
NEVER handle a musician's gear, period. It isn't even your stuff to
handle in the first place! Look...DON'T TOUCH!

written by Shenole Latimer