Artist Interview: Mindi Abair

    

 

 

Woodwind & Brasswind (WWBW): I have met you once, but you wouldn’t have remembered me. You were one of the judges for the “King of the Blues” promotion, if you’ll recall.

Mindi Abair (MA): Yes, the blues guitar thing. Joe Bonamassa was playing.

WWBW: Yes and Dr. John was there, if I recall correctly.

MA: Oh, yeah. Dr. John did his thing. That was a great night. Oh, my God.

WWBW: It was awesome. I met you very briefly. So you’ve been a friend of Guitar Center’s for a good while.

MA: Oh, for sure. Dave Weiderman’s taken care of everything for years and years. Absolutely anything I could ever do, I wanted to do, so it’s cool.

WWBW: So Dave was your artist relations connection to Guitar Center in the earliest times?

MA: Yes.

WWBW: Great. And I actually also saw you play once at the Hollywood Bowl with the Summer Horns tour with Dave Koz.

MA: Oh, wow. That was a few years ago. That was a fun tour.

WWBW: Gerald Albright and maybe someone else.

MA: It was Richard Elliot.

WWBW: Right. Does Dave do that every summer?

MA: He doesn’t do it every summer, but we made the record together and went out the first year and it was really successful, so we were like, well, I guess we should do it a second year. So we did it a second year as well. Then all of us were coming out with our own solo records. It’s hard to keep four solo artists out for a summer together and not be with their own band so we all kind of scattered for a while. He did another record this year that he wanted me to do for a new Summer Horns record, but my band put out a record late last year that has been doing really well on the blues charts.

I really wanted to follow through on that and be out for that so I turned it down this summer, but they’re out now with almost the same lineup. They replaced me with Aubrey Logan and Rick Braun. They’re out doing it.

WWBW: So it took two to replace Mindi. How about that?

MA: I know, right? [LAUGHTER] I was like, oh, yeah, bitch. Yeah!

WWBW: I’ve been seeing Little Feat ever since forever and Bill Payne didn’t do the most recent couple of tours and they replaced him with an organ specialist and a piano specialist, so that kind of thing.

MA: Wow. It makes you feel good. I love those guys.

WWBW: I know you do. And Rick Braun can fill the bill no matter what’s happening.

MA: Oh, my God, he’s such a badass.

WWBW: So, you do seem to have been called by the blues, like in a very authentic, real way. Is there a particular reason you’re aiming at it? Did something happen you want to talk to me about? [LAUGHTER]

MA: Could I be your therapist?

WWBW: You just woke up one morning – BA DAD A DAH DANT

MA: [SINGS] I got the blues. [LAUGHS] You know what? I grew up with a lot of rock and roll in my life. My father’s band, which I grew up on the road with—not in the band or anything, but as a kid running around with like a blue-eyed soul band. It was just high energy and it was fun and it was, you know, great.

Then when that band broke up, as all bands break up, he started putting together rock bands and he would put together eight rock bands a year that would tour the U.S. So, for the next 15 years of my life I was just around these bands, sitting in their practice rooms and hanging out. It was a huge influence on who I was and the earliest music I listened to.

When I got older, once I went to college for music, people were asking me, “Oh, are you a traditional jazz fan or are you a contemporary jazz fan?” And I said, “I don’t know the difference. I don’t listen to jazz. I have no idea.”

So I came into jazz very late. I was watching MTV. I wanted to be the girls from Heart or Tina Turner or the Big Man that played with Bruce Springsteen. I thought saxophone was just this powerful, awesome, rocking instrument. So to now be at a point in my career that I’m making blues rock records, it’s a funny kind of coming of age for me. For those people who have known me my whole life it makes all the sense in the world, but for those people who have maybe known me for a couple of records and then they see these records, they’re like what made you do that?

But the emphasis recently is, you know a few years ago I got hired to play on American Idol. I kind of got outside my little bubble. It’s this gift to have a bubble as an artist and be able to hire your own people and write your own music and play the shows you want to play, but you don’t go outside of yourself very much and push yourself. So to be a part of Idol was really fun. It was different artists every week that they’d ask me to come in and play the tracks for and play on TV. You had to get kind of immersed in this different world and try and do the right thing for these artists.

From there Steven Tyler asked me to join Aerosmith for the summer and I did that. Then I was touring with Max Weinberg from Springsteen’s band. It really exploded in my world, kind of the rock and roll aspect. I had always moonlighted with my rocker friends, always. It was always on the weekends that I wasn’t playing I was in L.A. playing with Waddy Wachtel’s band or off playing on one of my friend’s rock records or something like that.

But it really got to a big point, touring with Aerosmith and doing American Idol and touring with Max Weinberg. I finally came to the point where I said how come these parts of me are splintered? How come I go off and rock out at the biggest, to the biggest audiences with these huge bands and then I go back to my own career and I’m playing pop/jazz and I’m not putting any of this into it.

And don’t get me wrong, we’ve always kind of been the rockers of the jazz world, but this was a whole new level. So I asked my friends that I worked with. I said can you help me kind of put the pieces of me together? Help me make a record that can show all of me instead of kind of what I created at first, which was not all of me.

So my record “Wild Heart” kind of started this process. Gregg Allman came in and wrote with me and played. Joe Perry came in from Aerosmith and played with me. Booker T. Jones came in and wrote and played with me. Trombone Shorty, Keb’ Mo’, Max Weinberg from Springsteen’s band. So they helped me kind of put the pieces together that I felt like I could just be all of me in a record.

WWBW: That “all of me” was a pretty tough, salty, gut-bucket gin joint musician who all of a sudden become the darling of a pretty glitzy commercial world and then wanting not to lose where you came from and maybe not being 100% sure how to not lose that part of it. Kind of guessing.

MA: Yes.

WWBW: One of my questions I wrote here, so now that you’ve been in the trenches do you have a preference for slugging it out with blues bands in basement bars relative to playing tuxedo jazz on six-foot stages?

MA: [LAUGHS]

WWBW: I guess you’ve got to do both if you can, right?

MA: You know what? I have loved every record I’ve made. Now that we’re rocking out like crazy I don’t look at those records and go, eh, that wasn’t me. It was all me.  Every record’s a snapshot of where you’re at and I love pop music and we did a lot of that.

But do I have a preference? I mean my preference is to play music that moves me. Usually I’m more into the rock and roll than I am a traditional jazz player by any stretch. That was never the music that moved me so I never made a living playing traditional jazz, although I did do a few weddings and parties and stuff like that and did that.

But I really love being on a stage that’s bigger than life, that people have got their lighters in the air and their just, it’s the abandon of rock and roll or blues. I always did that with my band even as a contemporary jazz artist, but at new levels now [LAUGHS]

WWBW: I’ve played with people whose kids are on the road with them, scampering around the bus like you say. When did you really start playing? One of your father’s instruments is saxophone, right?

MA: Yes. I totally copied him. My grandmother was an opera singer and my dad was a saxophonist, B3 organist and just an uber-cool guy. He was that old-style rocker sax player that would shake and shimmy and knock his knees together and walk the bar. He was that guy.

WWBW: Cool.

MA: I started playing just like anyone else would. I started piano lessons at five and I started saxophone in school band. I was eight years old. It was fourth grade band. Our band director kind of put out all the different instruments on the ground. She was like, “Pick one and we’ll learn how to play them.” I walked around and I looked at everything, but I watched my dad run around and play that sax and it looked like a hell of a lot of fun.

WWBW: Seems an obvious choice.

MA: I thought, I want to have that much fun [LAUGHS] and I took it way too far. But I’m really lucky. No one told me it was odd for a girl to play a saxophone until it was way too late.

WWBW: I was going to say, so it never struck you as esoteric or weird to kind of aim yourself at being a professional musician. For a kid growing up in Vermont it was always like, “Who are these weirdos on TV blowing into horns?” Sure, we were doing it, but it really didn’t seem like a logical pursuit.

MA: I never thought of it like that. I guess I was one of those naïve kids that when your teachers or your parents said you could be anything you want to be, just find what you like, I completely, blindly believed them. And I’m glad I did because once I got out into the world I realized, oh, this is crazy, you know…

WWBW: Yes, highly competitive, too. I mean by the time you were a teenager you had seen the competition. You’d probably been really breathlessly impressed by great musicians that you had seen close up.

MA: Oh, yeah, for sure.

WWBW: So when did you kind of say if we’re going to turn the heat up on this thing maybe I need some formalized education? I know you went to Berklee for a while, right?

MA: I never had lessons in middle school and high school and stuff. I think I had maybe two or three private lessons. Less than a handful of lessons before college.

WWBW: If you had a particular question, I would imagine Pops could clear it up for you?

MA: Dad stayed out of it completely. For real, my father never told me anything until I was in the Florida All-State Jazz Band. I was first chair alto sax in the Florida All-State Jazz Band and it was the big concert. He came backstage. He’s like, “Let me show you a cool lick, kid.” And I’m like, oh, my God.

WWBW: Here it begins.

MA: You kidding me? He never showed my anything. I mean he just—now, looking back he wanted me to find it. I loved it. He wanted me to find it. He didn’t want to push it on me. But he came back and he showed me this lick with this false fingering. It was like rock and roll and cool. And I was just like, oh, my God, I’m going to go out and on my solo, I’m going to try it. This is great. So in the concert I do the little false fingering thing that he showed me and everything, but it didn’t work.\

WWBW: You’ve got to practice it.

MA: That wasn’t it. It was never going to work. In front of everybody it totally didn’t work. I was just like, “What?” So I go back to Dad after close and I was like, “So that false fingering, why didn’t it work?” And he goes, “Oh, I showed it to you on the wrong note. I’m sorry. It’s on an A.” [LAUGHTER]

WWBW: It’s like hey, do me a favor–don’t do my any favors.

MA: I was like, “Come on, Dad. This one thing you show me in my whole life was wrong.” And he’s like, “See? See? Now that’s why I didn’t want to be your teacher.” And I was like, all right.

WWBW: Teaching is a thing unto itself. I know you studied with George Garzone, right?

MA: Sure did.

WWBW: He’s something else. I’m from the town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, if you know it?

MA: Yes, sure I do.

WWBW: It’s like an hour and fifteen minutes north of Boston. So us amateur horn players would all pile down in the car, go down to Wally’s and get the floor mopped with us by either the Berklee kids or the gnarly old timers who were there.

MA: Whoever it was, you just went there to get your ass kicked so you know where you stood in the food chain. I did the same thing.

WWBW: Good times. But Garzone was just sacred. I would occasionally see him there.

MA: Garzone was really cool and we became friends. I had tea with him a couple of years ago when I went back to Berklee to do a master class thing. I told him, “I didn’t become the player that you would have had me be, but please know that what you taught me sunk in and it made me cooler and it made me a better player.”

He was just so cool at letting me feel music, that it wasn’t all about the technique, that it wasn’t all about you playing the right scale or the correct note on the correct chord change. I loved I’d walk in his room and he’d turn off the lights and he’d play some cluster chord and he’d say, “Play me the darkest note in that chord.”

Who thinks of music like that, you know? And he did have an answer that he wanted. But he just thought of music differently and he approached it differently. That will always stay with me. I think the world of that guy.

Joe Viola was the Yoda of saxophonist. I studied with him for years. I learned the art of the saxophone from Joe Viola, but I definitely learned a lot of nuance and feel and love of the saxophone from George Garzone.

WWBW: That’s a nice way to split those parts of it out. Speaking of which, I play trumpet at an enthusiastic hobby level, but there are different parts, components of playing any wind instrument. When you’re pulling your technique together do you ever have a year, like, okay, my altissimo is a little squeaky, I’m really going to button down my altissimo? Or man, my reading my dogging it. I’m really going to grind my reading this year? Or is it like a unified whole that kind of comes up all together?

MA: Wow, what a great question. Got to think about that. Damn you with the good question.

WWBW: It’s like working out. Sometimes it’s legs day. Sometimes it’s arms day.

MA: Yeah, yeah. No, I totally got you. Only geeky horn players like us would come up with questions like that. Good.

WWBW: I’m trying to have a diaphragm year, myself. [LAUGHTER]

MA: I love it. You’re so right that there are different days that you feel different weaknesses and there are different seasons for how you feel your playing is great or not great. There are times I feel like my altissimo is great and it needs no practice. I’m good. I feel good there and I’m practicing other things, but then there are times where I feel like I’m losing it and it feels thin to me and I have to explore why it’s feeling thin to me. Is it something I’m doing with my equipment that it’s not working for me right now? Or did I just get a bum box of reeds? Or is it me? Am I pinching it or am I breathing wrong or am I approaching it wrong?

It’s been a lifetime for me, of trying to assess my playing as I go and try and find those weaknesses and work on them one by one. It’s definitely different things, different months. I guess that’s just all part of the journey of music. We never have it all together. I’m doing cool and something else comes by and you’re like, ooh, I’ve got to do that.

WWBW: I guess herding cats is the popular description of it. It’s like keeping a floor swept with four open doors. There’s just always some kind of dirt that’s going to come in.

MA: There’s always things to inspire me. I’ll hear people play things, whether it’s a guitar player or a sax player, just someone that plays something and I think, I can’t play that. Wow, I’ve got to figure out how to play that. That’s totally cool. Or you see some player and you just go, wow, they’re so free. They can just play anything they feel at any point and I just really feel I need to get more there. There are times I feel much freer than other times. Just you can play whatever’s on your mind instead of being kind of stuck having to think about it. I love not having to think about it and just being free with that. That does take work.

WWBW: It does. The musician’s work is never done. I like to read John Coltrane, not just listen to him. He always threw missions, like these monolithic unachievable missions in front of himself, his intellectual high grounds. I remember one thing he said. He kind of got close to what he wanted to do harmonically but he’s way behind in what he wanted to assimilate rhythmically. Do you set these might tasks out before you? You kind of described it in when you hear somebody who’s just terrific, like Jim Snidero has got some things that nobody else has.

MA: Those guys are just, they’re from another planet. John Coltrane is the epitome of everything a technician should and can be and aspires to be. A saxophonist to look at what he did and what he accomplished and what he aspired to is just mind blowing.

WWBW: It is.

MA: And there are those players, the Michael Breckers, Jeff Coffin, all those guys are just mind blowingly technically proficient and just incredible.

WWBW: Endless imaginations.

MA: I never really came up thinking that way. I left that for the Coltrane’s and the Michael Breckers and the George Garzones of the world to attack that, but I think of things simpler. I think very melodically and I don’t think quickly. The bebop world to me just makes me nervous.

WWBW: It’s pretty much been--it’s in good hands [LAUGHS].

MA: Oh, it’s in good hands, but you find kind of what moves you and I love playing a melody. I love feeling something and sinking into a groove and playing what I feel over it. But when tasked with playing some double time star system figure that Coltrane came up with or something like that, it’s not me and it’s not how I feel things. So yeah, I was never that player that spent the hours in the practice room going over that stuff and really becoming that technician. I was more a feel player.

WWBW: I’m curious. Being from New Hampshire and identifying with Boston as my city naturally a lot of the musicians I knew view Steven Tyler as hometown hero.

MA: Oh, hell, yeah.

WWBW: Is he pretty hands-on with putting the music together or is he kind of set out the ideas and let it occur?

MA: Steven Tyler?

WWBW: Yes, as an MD, as a musical director. In rehearsals is it like here’s how it’s going to or how would you describe his stylistic in pulling a rehearsal together?

MA: Well, I’ll tell you. When I got hired for Aerosmith there was about 40 years of material to learn, right? And you know what? They have not used saxophones since 1973, so—

WWBW: But that’s the Aerosmith that I know. It’s that ripping solo on “Same Old Song and Dance.”

MA: When I got hired, no one gave me a set list. No one gave me music to learn and there were no rehearsals.

WWBW: What?

MA: I literally went into that gig with zero. The first night of the tour Joe called me in his office—you know, his office—his dressing room and he basically said, “Hey, could I do anything for you? Let me know what you need.” And I was like, “A set list would be great.” And, you know, I’m an Aerosmith fan. I know most of—I felt good about the fact that I would know what I needed to know. I knew most of what I needed to know, but a set list appeared, which was like, great.

Then Steven called me in his room. I looked at Steven and I was just like, “Where do you want me to sing? You want me to sing on top of you? Do you want me to sing with you? You want me to sing below you?” And he’s like, “Nah, just sing. Do it. You know.” I’m just like, you’ve got to be kidding me.

WWBW: He plays piano, right? He knows his way around.

MA: He plays great piano. But no, no musical direction and no rehearsal. I didn’t rehearse once with them. They didn’t rehearse together at all. The most that would happen is Steven would call me and Joe in his room and we’d talk about how we were going to do a song, when the solos were going to happen, whatever. That’s as much as it got. I think those guys have just been together so long that they don’t think about it anymore. They just go out. They look at themselves as an old blues band and they do their thing.

WWBW: Wow.

MA: It’s crazy, though. It was crazy to be me in that situation. [LAUGHTER]

WWBW: That’s not the answer I expected at all. I expected him to be pretty intense about it.

MA: He is intense. Even on the show he’d come up to me in the middle of the show, look at me with the vocals and make a, like make his body move a certain way to show me what he wanted me to do with the vocal.

WWBW: I get it.

MA: You know? He was just like up or down or, you know, he was like a snake kind of showing me what to do. He definitely takes that band and tells them what to do with his body. He’s just such a butterfly. He’ll just go out and flutter around.

WWBW: He’s one of the great stage performers in history. Have to mention him in the same breath as Mick Jagger or anyone else.

MA: Oh, absolutely.

WWBW: I would imagine you probably picked up some performance insights just by osmosis and proximity for your own bag of tricks.

MA: Oh, yeah. I told Joe Perry I was like, “When I was a kid I would watch Aerosmith and I would, I watched you play guitar.” I said, “I play my saxophone like you play a guitar. I always thought of myself as like a gunslinger with a saxophone and your moves on guitar are the moves that I have on sax.” People have asked me, “Where’d you get your moves?” I’m like, “Joe Perry.” [LAUGHS]

So yeah, it was funny to be on stage with them and, you know, they were people that I had watched for a lifetime.

WWBW: We’re all about the horns, but talk about singing a little bit. How important is it?

MA: I think—they always told me early on—they—they said hey, if you play piano and you sing you’re going to be much more hirable. I just thought I want to be a great saxophonist. When I was in college a lot of the musicians, we can be snobby and we didn’t really respect the female singers.

WWBW: Chick singer.

MA: The chick singer was not a respectable thing. They didn’t know their chord changes. They didn’t know when the bridge came in. So I didn’t tell anyone I sang. I wanted to be respected. I wanted to be a musician.

But when I got out into the real world I put away that stupid notion [LAUGHS] and I started singing on people’s gigs and I started singing on my own gig. It just opened this whole world for me and it was great. It did make me more hireable. I mean all I wanted to be was a solo artist, from the time that I started playing music that was always what I saw myself as.

But that didn’t happen immediately and so I ended up touring with a bunch of different people. You know what? Everyone wanted me to sing. And a lot of them wanted me to play piano. You know what? It helped. It helped me pay the rent. It was great.

WWBW: I remember I took an audition that I really wanted. I really liked the singer and they had a sax player and no trumpet. So I said, “Hey, man, do you need a trumpet player?” And the first thing out of the bandleader’s mouth was, “What else do you do?”

MA: Yes. I mean I got the Backstreet Boys gig because I played piano and sang and could play percussion and saxophone.

WWBW: Hey, I feel like I’m really chowing up your afternoon. I want to make sure I get to the gear component of it.

MA: Sure, sure. Do your thing.

WWBW: You’re an endorser of a saxophone?

MA: Yamaha. I play a custom V silver plated.

WWBW: What horns did you play coming up?

MA: I was a dork for—I was a total, just snobby saxophone person that I really, I played Selmer Mark VI for many years. Nothing could touch it. I was all about it. Yamaha, I went into their booth and I saw that Phil Woods was playing their saxophone. I was like, Phil Woods? Really? So I talked to the guy a little bit and I was like, well, let me try it. It was a great horn.

So I went over to Yamaha. It’s close to where I live in Los Angeles. I literally spent eight hours there A/B-ing the custom V to my Mark VI. I was just like no, no. This cannot be as good as my Mark VI. No, I will not, I cannot fathom that. I walked away with a Custom V and I’ve played it ever since.

It’s unbelievable. It’s solid. It’s full. It does what you want it to do. The resonance is just incredible. I love the silver. I think the resonance on the silver is just not to be beat. Incredible.

WWBW: Are there mechanical reliability issues that even inspires a preference over vintage horns?

MA: Well, yes. I mean you mentioned something that a lot of people don’t want to talk about, but yes. Let’s be realists for a second. You’ve got a horn that was built in the 2000s, it’s amazing how well it stays. It’s amazing they’re built so well and they’re so reliable. Whereas you’ve got a horn that was built in the ‘50s, ‘60s, it’s—

WWBW: It’s a jalopy. You’re going to spend an hour under it for every three hours you drive it.

MA: Yes, and I muscle it around. I’m not a careful jazz musician. We’re out there rocking and rolling. I just broke a piece off my saxophone last night and literally drove it to one of the guys houses that works at Yamaha last night after my gig. They’re fixing it and they’re going to get it back to me today.

WWBW: Nice. Are you up in the Northeast right now? I looked at your calendar.

MA: No, actually I’m in L.A. right now. We played right down by San Diego last night.

WWBW: I notice you were at Yoshi’s. Was it over the weekend, in Oakland?

MA: Yes, we were at Yoshi’s in Oakland and then we were in Fresno, yeah.

WWBW: Yoshi’s a great joint. I saw Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers there in the mid-‘80s with an 18-year-old Nicholas Payton.

MA: Holy shit, that was cool. Art always had great people in his band.

WWBW: Yes, that was kind of what he did. He found the greatest young horn players and gave them a bigger stage. What a gentleman. So, do you use a Yamaha stock case or since you’re so self-describedly rough with your toys do you get one of those—there are some really good shaped cases these days, super protective.

MA: Yes. I’ve got the Protec cases. Because it’s great. It gives all the protection, but I have places to put stuff. I can put the reeds and my in-ears and extra sandpaper and stuff that saxophone players need. Because I did have a case that was kind of a hard-sided case that was littler, but it had no place to put anything. In these days of—you know, I travel for a living and they’re rough on what you can travel with, so it’s nice to get a case that had all the protection, but had pockets so you could stash some stuff in so that when your reed goes south you can fix it or whatever, store stuff in there. I love my Protek cases.

WWBW: Speaking of reeds, do you have a preference or endorsement in that category?

MA: I have an endorsement with D’Addario Woodwinds. I’ve played their reeds my entire life.

WWBW: Like Rico to Rico Royal and on and on?

MA: Yes. They make all the Rico line and I use La Voz Medium soft. I’ve just used those for years and years and years. They work for me. They’re great. I love the way they feel. They’re easy to play. I love the way they sound. I’ve been with them absolutely forever.

WWBW: Are you fussy with your ligature?

MA: Not so much any more. A couple of years ago my horn got stolen. That’s like, ugh, your stomach drops as a—

WWBW: Did Dave Koz tell you about his stolen horn story?

MA: Yes.

WWBW: Like a 1923 curved soprano, irreplaceable thing.

MA: Can you imagine? You’re just… your whole world just like [GASPS]. Mine did and it … no one found the horn. It was gone. With it was my mouthpiece. My mouthpiece was this mouthpiece that I had customized with this guy for a long time. It was a one-off. There was no way to get it back.

So I had been kind of toying around--you know, we’re dorks. I’m a dork. I was toying around with my Theo Wanne piece for a couple of years. We decided we wanted to make the most amazing alto saxophone mouthpiece on the planet. I would play him stuff and just say, “I want more bottom end on this.” I’d play him some other stuff and I’m saying, “You hear that altissimo. It’s thin. I don’t want it thin. I want it just to pop out. Can we do that?”

So when my horn was stolen I called up Theo and I was like, “Hey, that badass mouthpiece that we’ve been working on for two years? Yeah, the Universe says we need to finish it.” So we met up. He brought his drills and his little saws and his little chisels and his everything. We finished that mouthpiece and evened it out and it’s just, it’s a force of nature. I couldn’t be prouder of it. We worked so hard on it, but it was more like a labor of love that probably would have taken just years and years and years had my stuff not been stolen.

So it was really kind of a cool thing to make lemonade out of lemons. I have this ridiculous mouthpiece that the ligature is part of. So it all works. There’s nothing to get crazy about. There’s no reason to go, “Ooh, I think I’ll try 16 different ligatures.”

WWBW: We do very well with Theo Wanne. He’s quite a fellow. He’s… I’m sure after your meetings he dragged himself off to a cave and gotten in touch with the Direct Feed and got some heavenly information. He’s an amazing spiritual person.

MA: Oh, yes. I’ll call him and he’s like just coming out of an interpretive dance class.

WWBW: Precisely.

MA: When we made the mouthpiece, we made it saying we want to make something for the people. Like all these mouthpieces are seven, eight hundred dollars and it’s inconceivable to pay that for most people. We wanted to make a cheaper mouthpiece that was great that people could be able to get their hands on and afford. It’s still not a cheap mouthpiece, but we did our best to put it in a price range that more people could afford because we wanted that. We thought that was the way to kind of give back to the world. He’s very much that spiritual mentality and I just love him for that. I love that he’s this person and that his intentions are always pure. We need more of that in this music business. I want more of that in my life.

WWBW: I know. You think of manufacturing and especially durable goods as being, especially something made out of metal as being a bit cold and soulless and he is anything but that. I appreciate the tone of your having felt really lucky and your gratitude comes through in your general speaking. You seem to me to be in the what-can-I-do-for-you phase of your career. It’s noticed and I appreciate it.

MA: It’s nice to be able to get to a place and go, okay, how do we make it better for the next generation? I love seeing people play the mouthpiece that Theo and I made and their eyes light up and they go, “Woah! Thing’s revved up.” That kind of stuff that someone else can make their art on it.

I do a lot for—we’re doing a dinner tonight, actually, in Los Angeles with the Grammy Association. They are involved so much with music education for kids. They’ve got a coalition now of a lot of different charities that they’re putting together that all these splintered efforts are going to come together. Boy, I was so lucky as a kid to have a band department. That’s why I’m standing here with a saxophone in my hand today.

WWBW: Imagine if there wasn’t one?

MA: I’ve got to give back and help the young kids today get what we got. The Recording Academy put together something called the Grammy Music Education Coalition, the GMEC. What they basically did was unite all these different charities that have been working—not together, working separate—to help kids get instruments or help give kids resources or teachers or whatever. What would happen if you put all these resources together, pooled them and really brought about this monolith of power and intent? Could we actually give every kid a teacher? Give every kid a chance to have a band class?

I think we can, but I love the “blue sky” thinking and I love the fact that it’s a priority for the Recording Academy, that they would put all the eggs in their basket and just push them forward and go, “Who’s with us?” I’m with them. I’m for it.

WWBW: They’re lucky to have you. What will you be doing in the first part of 2019? I think this hits homes early January.

MA: Cool. We’re putting out a Christmas record right now.

WWBW: Have a bone-shaking little Christmas?

MA: Oh, my God, it’s so fun. It’s not that sit in the corner and drink eggnog kind of thing.

WWBW: No cherubs?

MA: It’s like get crazy and take off all your clothes and [walk] down the street “Merry Christmas.” It’s that. It’s really fun [LAUGHS]. So that comes out in a couple of weeks.

WWBW: Okay. Any shows in and around L.A.?

MA: We just played my band shows. I’m going to take off on a Christmas tour that’s with Dave Koz, actually, starting after Thanksgiving. So we’re going to hit a bunch of places. As far as next year, we’re recording an album in January so it should be out first quarter, end of the first quarter of next year. So we’ll have a new record.

WWBW: Your material is all selected for that?

MA: Almost. Still got to get that better song, got to beat that other song. I’ve got a pile of songs, but, you know, got to write better ones always.

WWBW: So you’re the chief writer on these tunes?

MA: I write most of it, yes. But we all co-write together as well and just see what happens. But I mean I had over 50 songs to choose from for the last record. You just want to write so that you’ve got stuff to choose from that really makes a journey, I think, for people.

WWBW: Will you be touring that record?

MA: Yes, we’re going to be out on the road all of next year. We’ll just be solid. So tell people to go to my website, Mindiabair.com. It’ll all be there.

WWBW: All right. Thank you. You’ve been awesome today.

MA: Thanks for all the cool questions. It’s meaningful and it’s cool to talk dorky sax stuff with you.

WWBW: Well, the readers are dorks, too. You’re a dork. I’m a dork. Everywhere a dork dork.

MA: [LAUGHTER]. That’s all good. If you need anything else, call me.

WWBW: Okay. Thanks a million.