Last week I spent some time with this gentleman outside the Old Mint.
He’s a jazz musician. Played with some of the greats up and down California, the kind names you’d recognize if you knew anything about the real music, the stuff that mattered before everything got packaged and sold back to us as nostalgia. He taught at Foothill and De Anza colleges. Had students. Had a life built on the thing he loved, the thing he was born to do.
Then 2008 happened. The bottom fell out for him like it did for so many others. Not because he failed. Not because he wasn’t good enough. But because the world decided that his kind of excellence didn’t matter anymore, that there wasn’t room for it in the new economy of fear and contraction. He sold his horn in 2011. Try to wrap your head around that for a second. Your instrument, the thing that’s been an extension of your body, your voice, your entire reason for getting up in the morning…
Gone.
Traded for rent money, for food, for survival.
But he’s not stopping.
He’s always teaching. Still passing it on, even without the horn in his hands. He’s putting a band together. And he feels the turn coming, that shift in the air that tells you maybe, just maybe, things are about to break your way again.
That’s not optimism. That’s not delusion. That’s what it means to be a musician, to be an artist. You don’t do it because it’s easy or because it pays. You do it because you don’t have a choice. Because even when everything’s stripped away, the music remains.
And you keep going.