“William,” said my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Tobias, “you’re a very good writer. You should keep at it.” Not only was Mrs. T the gentle, understanding teacher I needed at the time, but this middle-aged, bespectacled woman was also the object of one of my earliest crushes. Naturally, I took her words to heart.
For the past half century, I have indeed kept at it, scribbling various things—blogs, articles for music publications, a screenplay, a curriculum for beginning jazz musicians, mental health counseling essays, and, more recently, creative nonfiction pieces for literary magazines.
But a book? Nah. I couldn’t imagine having the time or motivation to actually sit down and bang out the 60,000 words or so that make up a whole dang book. Besides, what the heck would it be about?
Along came the Covid-19 pandemic. My psychotherapy practice migrated fully online. Like millions of other humans, I holed up in my house for two years. Time was a Slinky, expanding and contracting according to its own mysterious rhythms. The unpredictability of this period left me unmoored in a way that the one-two punch of work and Netflix couldn’t combat. I needed an anchor, preferably one that would absorb me completely into its friendly depths.
I’d already habituated a daily writing practice, beginning in July 2018. I’d generated scads of raw material, which fell into three main categories: stories about my musical life, musings about my family’s history, and miscellaneous detritus about not much of anything. It was the first category of scribbles that caught my attention. The more I combed through what I’d written about my forty years as a bass player, the more I thought there might be something in there that could be shaped into a publishable essay or two.
Using the existing material as a starting point, I wrote a piece called “In the Pits,” about working in the theater. After many revisions with the help of a wonderful editor, it turned out pretty good. Then I wrote one about finding my dream bass (“La Contrebasse Française”). And another about breaking my knuckle playing softball (“Dems Da Breaks”).
I continued crafting more of these anecdotes into full-blown essays. More chapters (as I was starting to call them) appeared. To borrow Anne Lamott’s phrase, I kept putting down one damn word after another. By the end of 2021, after a pandemic-fueled frenzy of literary activity, I wound up with something resembling Making the Low Notes.
Many editors, formal and informal, left their positive imprint on this memoir, but right now I’d just like to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to Mrs. Tobias.