Careers

July 19--Jose Acosta was 8 years old the first time he picked up a saxophone. By college he knew he wanted to make it his career. "But the career I've had so far," says Acosta, now 34, "it's definitely not what I was imagining back then." Consider the list of gigs he's played since going pro: an elementary school in China, a 15,000-seat auditorium in Australia, an orphanage in Malaysia, the flight deck of a massive warship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Especially these days, few employers offer steady work and guaranteed pay and benefits to play an instrument. The United States military is one of them, and the vast majority of its thousands of musicians get their start at the same place in Virginia Beach that Acosta did: the Navy School of Music at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story.