maxonsax

The short version goes like this My name is Max. I play the sax. Thank you.A bit longer and it goes something like this: My name is Max, I play sax. I currently live in Nashville, Tennessee and travel all over God's creation playing music for anyone kind enough to show up.The excruciatingly long version goes like this: I was born the child of David and Mary Abrams in Stonewall Jackson Memorial Hospital, Lexington Virginia, November 10th, 1977. How my parents wound up in that particular delivery room, having fled the tupperware container of America's melting pot, Long Island, NY, only to end up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains is a story for another day. For now we will stick to its immediate aftermathNaming me took some time. My parents, after a full inspection, concluded that my paternal great grandfather's name would do just fine. Once informed of the final decision, the nurse filling out the birth certificate declared to my parents, the gods, and anyone else within earshot that Max was a dog's name, not fit for a child. To make matters worse, my parents were pretty sure they were only going to have one kid, so they gave me two middle names, Gabriel and Quinn. The whole thing, Maxwell Gabriel Quinn Abrams, was a bit unwieldy for someone weighing scarcely 6 pounds. Like your first pair of Hush Puppies, the pair you thought were horribly ugly until they became terribly fashionable 20 years later, my name was not something I liked much at first. As soon as I was able to speak in complete sentences, I begged my mother to let me change it to the greatest name I could think of, which, if you were a five-year-old boy in 1982, was Luke Skywalker. She wouldn't give in. I was stuck for the long haul.We moved to Lynchburg, Virginia from Amherst County when I was six. Like every small city we had a close-knit group of great musicians that were dedicated to their craft, if only for the love of it. I started playing saxophone professionally with a local band called Mainstreet Rythym and Blues when I was 13. Ironically, playing in every room with a door and a bar in Central Virginia kept me out of trouble. I was lucky to be surrounded by parents and players that understood what real trouble was. Being a fourteen-year-old kid out until 4 AM on a Saturday night playing music with friends isn't really a big deal. (Getting hammered in a friend's basement, going out, getting in a fight, shooting someone or getting shot yourself, and getting arrested is a very big deal. That happened to too many of the guys I grew up with. It's a shame.)My senior year of high school, someone at Princeton University in New Jersey decided that the hardworking, future leaders of the Western world needed some entertainment, so they let me in. Many people get fabulous educations at Princeton and spend the rest of their lives reflecting back on the many gifts that fine institution bestowed upon them. As for me, I pretty much spent four years trying to figure out why I was spending four years there. After graduating, my immediate goal was to get as far away as I could and still be able to order a drink in English.Moving back to the South after college was like going into a witness protection program. In retrospect it was the most psychotic, liberating decision I ever made. I drove to Nashville on November 1st, 1999 with an inflatable mattress, a suitcase, a 1956 Selmer Mark VI tenor sax, and the phone numbers of a couple guys I had never met.My first landlord kept an open bottle of Jack Daniels and a loaded .38 on his nightstand. I worked any job I could find. Packing books in a warehouse, making cookies in a cookie factory, doing order entry at an office furniture company (I would always ship whole semi trucks full of office furniture to Montana instead of Mississippi by mistake. The company went out of business a few months after I quit. All apologies if I had anything to do with that...). After a while I started playing music with some folks. A few years later some of them started doing quite well. They were kind enough to take me along with them. Most of their names appear in the discography section of this web site or in my links page. I am more grateful to them than they may ever know.That's the story. If you have any questions head over to the contact page and shoot me an email. If it's a question about how to make it in music or become a member of Muzik Mafia, the answer is simple: Practice your craft till you are the best, then stick around long enough to prove it. We will find you.Thanks for reading.Truly, Max