One middle-aged St. Petersburg saxophone player feels out of tune with his transient life.
The bottoms of his dark blue jeans are ripped, his left running shoe is held together with a yellow elastic band and the thick black and white hairs of his beard and mustache look disheveled. But as he sits on a white bucket in his usual spot near the BayWalk promenade in downtown St. Petersburg, the notes of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia,’’ traveling through his soprano saxophone, are clean.
Max Pierre didn’t choose a job that would give him the freedom to live. He chose a life that would give him the freedom to work – the freedom to work at playing jazz.
Pierre’s choice is not without its costs. He’s transient. He rents a room for $125 a week in Tampa, and when he goes to St. Pete during baseball season, he sleeps on friends’ couches. He also sleeps on the street.
But Pierre turns 50 in August, and life on the street is taking a toll. He’s getting tired of sleeping on the street. He wants to get a place, but apartment hunting takes time away from playing music.
So, he finds himself locked up in practical calculations of how to order his life. He’s trying to work out an equation that gives him stability, while maintaining his freedom.
One thing is certain: his music is the constant.
Pierre is the youngest of four children, and the only one not born in New Orleans, the jazz capital of the world, he says. Ironically, he is the only musician. Pierre was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He chose band over art for his eighth-grade elective and started playing the tenor saxophone. The instrument was so big for him that he’d borrow a shopping cart from a nearby grocery store and push it home from school so he could practice.
Pierre switched to soprano saxophone and played through high school, then as a music major at Tennessee State University and at the University of North Texas College of Music. But he never finished his degree.
Pierre had bigger aspirations.
“I didn’t finish because I was so determined and confident I was going to make the big time,” he says. “North Texas State was turning out educators. I didn’t want to teach – I wanted to play with Miles Davis.”
Pierre, then 26, hopped in a van to New Orleans with a musician friend, his saxophone and hopes of making it big. It was 1985. He spent his days driving a cab and practicing chords. In the evenings, he networked. Pierre remembers meeting Reginald Veal, a jazz bassist who he says played on stage with Ellis Marsalis, a famous jazz pianist. Pierre connected briefly with Marsalis and his sons, Wynton and Branford.
Then someone stole Pierre’s saxophone.
He started drinking heavily.
“I was trying to get up but it just wasn’t in me,” Pierre says. “In my heart, I failed.”
A few months later, another musician gave Pierre an extra horn, but it was too late. He had given up. He tossed the horn in the back seat of his cab. For three years, Pierre spiraled downward. Then he went back to Cincinnati, defeated and ashamed. He started waiting tables.
But after two years of sitting in bars watching bands play, the music drew him back in. Pierre says he wasn’t built for normalcy. He started playing in clubs, but learned from a friend that the streets were more lucrative.
Today, Pierre plays exclusively on the street. He says he wouldn’t play a club on a Friday or Saturday unless it offered $250. He says he’d play for less on a weeknight.
Performing on the streets of Cincinnati, Pierre loved not having to deal with higher-ups, schedules and rules. But during the winters, his income took a dive. In 2001, he moved again, this time to sunny Tampa, Fla.
“When I was young, I was after fortune and fame, but mostly fortune,” he says. “Somewhere along the way, it became about the music.”
On a typical day, Pierre sets up shop near the BayWalk Promenade in the morning or afternoon. He plays songs people will know, like “Tequila” or the “Pink Panther,” he says.
People don’t recognize Coltrane.
Pierre plays for an hour, sometimes more. Then, he takes a break to eat and give others a chance to play his spot, which has become a prime location for local street musicians. He grabs a slice of pepperoni pizza or a cup of peanut butter soft-serve ice cream. Sometimes he drinks a cold Budweiser.
Then he goes back to work. Pierre plays before baseball games outside Tropicana Field, then heads downtown to catch the late-night crowd. When he gets tired, he sleeps at a friend’s place, or on a bench. When he needs clean clothes, he lugs his white bucket to a 24-hour laundromat before sunrise and heads back out to the streets to play.
When baseball season ends, Pierre plays in Tampa.
“A lot of people look at me and assume things about me,” Pierre says.
“I know what I look like. But guess what? I live a rugged lifestyle.”
Pierre knows his lifestyle isn’t good for him. When he was 18, his brother-in-law gave him a book about yoga called Science of Breath. It taught him about achieving balance of mind, body and spirit. But where does music fit? He couldn’t figure it out. So he put the pursuit of balance on his to-do list and kept playing.
“Everybody has an ideal of how they want to be,” Pierre says.
“I do, too, but I fall short.”
Pierre wants to secure an apartment in St. Petersburg. He’s been thinking about a place near a yoga studio and a YMCA. But he hasn’t been able to focus on it long enough to take any action.
He just wants to play music.
“The freedom, that’s what I love about it,” he says. “It’s like being a millionaire—with no money. Freedom is not stable. But I need to get moving on something because I’m getting tired.”
Pierre says his mom and his siblings wish he lived a more conventional life: a house, a wife, maybe kids. They wish he had a phone they could call him on.
Last month, Pierre went to buy a cell phone, but didn’t like anything he saw. He’s also trying to quit drinking. On July Fourth he visited his regular pub for a few afternoon beers.
“My thinking and my body need to be pure for that spiritual energy to unfold in me,” he says. “But it’s the women, wine and song thing — those are the kinds of things I need to get beyond.”
But sometimes it’s hard to tell whether Pierre really does want to get past those things. He continues to play the same street corners. He visits the same eateries, pubs and laundromats. People around town know who he is.
Pierre hasn’t found the order he craves— the equation that includes freedom and stability. Still, his life has a subtle orderliness to it. And the equation behind that order revolves around Pierre’s music.
“My dysfunction is self-made,” he says. “I have no excuse. I was brought up with a good family and Sunday prayers. Some people were abused —not me.
“I just love music.”