While I’m using this blog as a free bulletin board, I should also mention the upcoming benefit concert I’m playing with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony, this June 21st at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall.

The concert itself is Mozart and more Mozart: the Posthorn Overture, the Clarinet Concerto (with world-renowned soloist Jon Manasse), and the complete Requiem (featuring the New Amsterdam Singers’ double choir).

One hundred percent of ticket sales from the concert support the truly excellent Lincoln Center Institute for Arts in Education, which, for more than 25 years, has brought experiential education in the arts (including dance, music, theater, visual arts and architecture) to students of all ages around the country.

Lest you doubt the Institute’s ability to grow aesthetes, consider a recently relayed story about a six-year old kindergarden student who, shortly after her class had completed a two-week program on visual arts, came running in tears to her teacher to report: “Jimmy says abstract art isn’t really art!”

Tickets for the benefit concert go on sale this weekend at the Lincoln Center box office. For any symphony-loving arts-education-supporters on a tighter budget, shoot me an email for information on discounted tickets.

While nobody but trumpet-playing readers are likely to understand: just started rehearsals for two orchestras’ next concert cycles; the programs include Tchaik 5, Pictures, Dvorak 8 and the Mozart Requiem. I haven’t had that many notes in my parts over the last two years combined.

“There was nothing not to like.”
– Anne Midgette, in her New York Times review of the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony concert I played in Friday night.

Over the past few months, along with my extracurricular trumpet playing, I’ve also started to do a bit of trumpet teaching. Helping students quickly improve is immensely vicariously satisfying, as I remember all too vividly my own struggles through the years trying to wrangle beautiful sounds from these little coils of brass.

Oddly, I’ve discovered that much of what made learning to play the trumpet difficult for me has made teaching it vastly easier. While many of the pros I play with now were naturals, I had to struggle for every small step I took forward, and the exercises and approaches that were most helpful to me seem to be similarly successful for other trumpeters – young and old – facing the same problems.

Along with the usual sorts of students – high school kids working their way up the band seating order, or adult players who put the horn down for a few decades before realizing they wanted to come back to it – I’ve also found a couple with considerably stranger stories.

One, for example, heard an NPR piece about the shortage of buglers available to play Taps at military funerals (a problem worsening as increasing numbers of WW2 veterans pass away). The piece mentioned a group called Bugles Across America (to which I belong), that helps family members find volunteer trumpet players willing to play Taps. She went to the site, and decided to learn trumpet well enough to join the group. Somewhere along the way, she also got hooked on the instrument in general, and is now trying to make up for lost time, bringing her beginning-level playing to the point where she can eventually play with small community groups.

Another woman emailed to say she was dating a trumpet player (God help her!), that his birthday was coming up, and that she wanted to try learning some basic music to play as a birthday surprise. I suggested Happy Birthday as well as the relatively simple (and romantically appropriate) My Funny Valentine, then set her to work.

Mainly, though, I’m happiest to see the progress my slightly more experienced students are making. If they keep up their current paces, they should be beating me out for gigs in the not-to-distant future, and I know I’ll be secretly thrilled.

Had a rehearsal last night with the New York Centre Symphony for a rather intimidating upcoming concert, which includes Bernstein’s Westside Story, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, and the Milhaud Percussion Concerto – all rather trumpet-heavy pieces. The 1812, for example, is scored for four trumpets – two Eb trumpets and two cornets. Yesterday, however, due to schedule conflicts throughout the rest of the section, I was the only trumpet player to show up.

Playing principal in the group, I’d become used to being the most audible part in the section, though I wasn’t quite as prepared to play as the only part in the section. I hadn’t previously realized, for example, that in multiple places in the 1812, the entire orchestra stops playing, aside from the trumpets (or in this case, trumpet) who repeatedly play an extended, loud, high, and rather technically difficult fanfare.

I cannot possibly convey the initial feelings of terror upon my discovering this fact, which largely involved me playing at the top of my lungs over dead silence throughout the rest of the room. Still, despite the initial shock, it went much better than I would have expected, at least given the unintendedly soloistic nature of the playing. Following the piece, the conductor looked over to me, laughed, and said, “well, now at least I know you can play your part!”

[Note to self: next time, learn to play the viola or some other quiet instrument that hides well within a large, rather anonymous section.]

No real posts today or tomorrow, as I’m up at the SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Music for the New York Brass Conference. Lots of great concerts (including one by my old trumpet teacher at Yale), masterclasses, and other fun trumpet stuff. Apologies to non-brass-playing readers.

Over the years, I’ve read many times that Miles Davis, when asked by young trumpeters how they might improve their own playing, would invariably respond: buy a piano. And certainly, Miles wasn’t the only trumpeter thinking along those lines; two of my other favorite jazz players, Clifford Brown and Dizzy Gillespie, doubled on piano well enough to release recordings featuring them at the keys. Even a world apart, in the arena of classical playing, William Vacchiano, a long-time fixture of the New York Philharmonic’s extraodinary trumpet section, once famously remarked that, had he spent half his trumpet practice time at the piano, he would have been not only a better piano player, but a better trumpet player as well. When it comes to understanding functional harmony, there’s nothing quite like the piano, with no other instrument so linearly and visually laying out melodies, harmonies, and the relationships between them.

So, it is with serious embarassment that I must admit I am an exceedingly remedial pianist. I have a mean ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, and that’s about it. Yesterday, however, as I passed by Sam Ash, I noticed a handful of electric keyboards on clearance sale in the window. Years of accumulated non-piano-playing guilt sent me through the doors, and I came home last afternoon with a full-size Yamaha PSR-273 electric keyboard. Sadly, despite it possessing literally hundreds of other features I will never conceivably use, this model appears to lack the occasionally found karaoke add-on, dashing my hopes of making money on the side by inviting Asian tourists from nearby Time Square into my apartment for rousing rounds of song and drink. Still, karaoke or no, armed with a textbook (John Valerio’s Jazz Piano Concepts), I yesterday butchered my way through a first short practice stint. While it will be a long, long time before I’m ready to play in public, with the music theory I already possess, after several years of hard work I honestly believe I could even push my playing skills all the way up to somewhere just below mediocre.

This is slightly discouraging, considering how blazingly quickly I picked up my other back-up instrument, the upright bass, though it’s also a good reminder that I picked up the bass quickly not because I’m some sort of musical genius, but rather because the bass is really, really, really easy. Consider this classic jazz joke:

A young boy comes home one day and tells his father he’d like to learn to play the bass. Glad that his son is taking an interest in music, the father heads to the local music store, picks out a bass, and signs his son up for a week of lessons to get him off on the right foot.

The next evening, the father asks his son what he learned in his first lesson.

“Well,” his son replies, “I learned the first four notes on the fourth string.”

The following evening, after the same question, the son answers “I learned the first four notes on the third string.”

On night three, it’s “I learned the first four notes on the second string.”

The fourth night, the father again asks his son how his lesson went.

“Actually,” says the kid, “I couldn’t make the lesson today. I had a gig.”

In my estimation, this joke is only slightly hyperbolic, as after about two years of playing the bass I’m now occassionally called in to sub gigs, whereas after two years of trumpet playing I still basically sounded like a slowly and painfully dying cow.

By now, even after nearly seventeen years of trumpet playing, I still occassionally feel like I’m in dying cow territory, and I’m especially concerned about a relapse in that direction tomorrow. I’ve been hired in as trumpet soloist for St. Luke’s Easter service, where I’ll be playing a Baroque suite, and descant lines on most hymns. The pieces, requiring delicate, highly exposed and spritely playing throughought, would be a stretch even when at my best, and may prove altogether impossible when performed at a morning hour early enough that my eyes are still to bleary to read the music. Wish me luck.

Last night, I sat in with a great jazz combo playing at Ye Olde Tripple Inn, a bar a few blocks from where I live. The gig went well, and most of the group was exceedingly complementary – to their ears, I was told, I sounded like the re-embodied ghost of Woody Shaw. The bass player, however, knew otherwise – I could see it in his eyes. He was the only one who could tell I wasn’t playing complex harmonic ideas because I was intentionally sidestepping, substituting tritones, and building upper structure triads. I was playing complex harmonic ideas because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

For me, playing jazz is a bit like speaking French. Which is to say, I can’t actually speak any French at all. But I do have a remarkably good ear for accents*, and can pretend to speak French well enough to not only convince non-speakers I’m fluent, but even to convince those who’ve studied the language for a few years (apparently under the belief that I speak so fluently they just can’t keep up).

To be fair, the analogy between jazz and French isn’t precise; while both follow formal grammars, language conveys precise meaning in a way music is rarely meant to. So, at a certain level, sounding like you can play jazz and actually being able to play jazz are the very same thing. It is, after all, an aural tradition.

And, in fact, I do know the grammar of jazz. It’s just that I know it only academically, intellectually, rather than having the myriad chords and scales and all their variants seamlessly enough under my fingers to play them through without conscious thought. So, under the heat of the moment, as tunes fly by, I fall back on my ear, on simply playing what sounds right.

Hence my new resolution: going forward, I’ll be working hard to bring my academic jazz theory up to practical jazz theory. Running patterns again and again to ingrain the harmonies deep enough in my subconscious that, when, as I do now, I let whatever music is in my head push through the bell of my horn, it pushes through in a form that’s, jazz-wise, unimpeachably grammatically correct.

Until then, though, I’ll be faking it by ear and heart. Unless I’m looking to impress last night’s bass player (or any of the other small handful of extremely well trained listeners who can actually tell the difference), that seems to be good enough.

*side story: While underage, I drank for years on an Australian fake ID, managing a 100% success rate (even in front of Australian bartenders) in passing both my accent and the ID off as the genuine article.