“I am better at tonguing than you.”

    “Yeah! Well I have a better vibrato.”

    Arthur Apcar and Tim Gomez laugh at each other and fight over who is the better musician. “If someone pulls you to do something and you pull them, you lift each other up,” Gomez said. “It is all friendly competition. I am always trying to be better than him.”

    This competition began while in the middle school band. Apcar was on trumpet, Gomez on flute. Soon afterward, Gomez changed his instrument to a baritone saxophone. “I wanted a challenge. Flute takes little air, but the bari sax is so big, half my body size, and I have to fill it with air to get a sound.”

    He said that the person who pushed him to take on a tougher instrument was Benjamin Bricker, his band teacher for freshman and sophomore year. He was most satisfied with his growth during those years. Apcar nods his head to agree. “He drove us to be better than we were.” It was Bricker who had them play the music they really love: jazz.

    Apcar had grown up with a love for jazz, stemming from his father. “On my dad’s off days, he would play old records, like Miles Davis.” Davis became a role model for him. Apcar tries to emulate him. Standing up to get the best sound possible, Apcar blares through the trumpet, trying to get the sound he heard in those “crazy songs” when he was a kid. But he said the real person who made him want to play trumpet was his brother. “I always looked up to my older brother. He played trumpet too. I always thought that was cool.”

    Gomez had also been influenced by his family.

And while he had grown up with more conventional music (he listened to “Barney”), his grandmother taught him about jazz. “She bought me my first sax,” he said.

        It is this love of jazz that has fueled their friendship, they say, and caused them to create their own quartet. They are trying to get something started with Apcar’s brother because he has a band. But bumps have caused plans to be altered.

        Gomez has moved, which made it hard to meet and he has stopped taking jazz band in school, causing a loss in a sax because he has borrowed from the school in the past. “It has ruined things. I still love it, but I can’t appreciate it every day like I want to.”But Apcar is confident that things will keep going. “We should have it going by college.” They want to continue playing no matter what their major is.

    “It keeps me going from day to day.” Apcar said. “If I am happy, sad, in any type of mood, I can express it and get away from my problems.” He says this is why he loves jazz so much.

    Though they tease each other and try to be better than the other, they both admit that the other is better. “Tim could win girls’ hearts with his musical ability.”

    Laughing at his friend, Gomez said that Apcar is really the driving force behind him. Without him, he would not be so “beast.”