I played Sousaphone in a high school marching band in Northern Virginia ("Freddy Pfeiffer and his Funny Frolics on the Football Field"). Also played tuba in the high school band. But from my late teens, I plunged into the guitar world, eventually making pedal steel my main working axe.
Somewhere along the line I picked up an old King Super 20 tenor sax and started playing that. These days I play alto (a nice Yanigasawa) in our local community college orchestra. Twice a week I take my little horn to school and sit among the kids (I am 80), playing the best I can.
Orchestral and band music are great, especially for young people. They learn to pay attention to several things at once; follow a leader; develop neuromuscular pathways; learn some Italian words like presto and andante; encounter "classical" music from Renaissance to modern; fill in their musical gaps (we are now playing a Glenn Miller medley, a bandleader whom many of my young colleagues have not heard of; and have fun! Finally, a student with a horn has to care for, clean, and treat gently a piece of analog machinery. Yep: no batteries, no screen, no downloading, no switches.
