When the room started spinning, Chris Potter knew that something was seriously wrong. The tenor saxophonist hadn’t had a drink, but when he got home from his gig at the East Village jazz spot Small’s, a wave of vertigo swept over him so suddenly that he had to lie down.

“I didn’t know what was going on,” says Potter, 35, calling from a Best Western in Chicago. “I was just very dizzy, and for about a year, I had these intermittent attacks of vertigo. I continued to work, and it was extremely stressful, not to know if you were going to be able to stand up in the morning, much less get on two planes and a train for a concert.”

Potter had contracted the mysterious malady Meniere’s disease, an inner-ear disorder for which there’s no known cause or cure. He underwent several rounds of surgery, but ended up losing most of his hearing in one ear. Rather than slowing him down, the experience galvanized the virtuosic saxophonist, who has emerged in recent years as a bandleader looking to forge an improvisation-laced sound informed by funk and hip-hop.

MENIERE’S DISEASE TREATMENT

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