Trumpet Study Methods

It seems that trumpet players are always concerned about playing lots of notes quickly and correctly (i.e., "technique") and playing high notes (i.e. “screaming”). Where does that come from? Perhaps it is because all the great trumpet players do both. Where to begin? All amateur and aspiring trumpet students start out with Arban’s or Saint-Jacome's method books.

Joseph Jean Baptiste Laurent Arban (1825 – 1889) was probably the first famous trumpet (cornet) soloist. Born in France, he entered the Paris Conservatory at an early age, taking up the study of valved cornet. He was in the French Navy and became a professor at the Military School in 1857. Arban was then elected professor of cornet at the Conservatory in 1869. He was also a cornet soloist throughout Europe and authored Method for the Cornet (1870), which was endorsed and adopted for instruction at the Conservatory. It is still in print. This method of studying the cornet, which is often referred to as the "Trumpeter's Bible," is still studied by modern brass players. It contains hundreds of exercises. The method begins with fairly basic exercises and progresses to very advanced compositions. It focuses on trumpet technique. I started with an Arban’s in the 1960s. It seems all the other trumpet students also studied out of Arban’s.

Louis A. Staint-Jacome (1830 – 1898) was born in Paris and died in London. Louis began his musical training at the age of seven on the piano and violin, taking lessons from his stepfather, a bandmaster. He later studied the cornet at the Paris Conservatory from which he graduated in 1850, winning first prize on the instrument. He must have personally known, or surely at least been familiar with Joseph Arban. In 1870 he became musical arranger for a publishing company and during his tenure with that company he wrote his famous Grand Method for cornet.

It is considered by many players and educators as second to none, except perhaps for the Arban’s. Many teachers believe that the Arban’s method and the St. Jacome method compliment each other, and that the two of them together comprise a complete education on the trumpet.

The French and European trumpet methods of study surely made their way to the United States and influenced American trumpet players.

John Philip Sousa (1854 – 1932) was an American composer and conductor known particularly for American military and patriotic marches. He is known as "The March King." Sousa was born in Washington, D.C., and started his music education by playing the violin. When Sousa reached the age of 13, his father, a trombonist in the Marine Band, enlisted his son in the United States Marine Corps as an apprentice to keep him from joining a circus band. Sousa served his apprenticeship for seven years until 1875. In 1880 he returned to the U.S. Marine Band and remained as its conductor until 1892. Sousa led "The President's Own" band under five presidents.
Sousa organized his own band the year he left the Marine Band, but also served during World War I, leading the Navy Band at the Great Lakes Naval Station. After returning to his own band at the end of the war, he continued to wear his naval uniform for most of his concerts and other public appearances. The Sousa Band toured from 1892–1931, performing at 15,623 concerts. It was a very popular band.

Herbert L. Clarke (1867 – 1945) was an American cornetist, composer, conductor, teacher and one of the most influential musicians at the turn of the 20th Century. In 1893, he joined Sousa and his band in the solo cornet section. After he turned 50, he began to concentrate on conducting and teaching. He opened his own school of cornet playing in Chicago. Clarke died in 1945 and was buried in Washington DC near the grave of his lifelong friend, John Philip Sousa.

Claude Gordon (1916 – 1996) was known as the "King of Brass." He was a trumpet soloist, band director, educator, lecturer, and author. His father was a clarinet soloist as well as an orchestral director. Gordon became Herbert L. Clarke's protégé from 1936 until Clarke died in 1945. During the era of live radio and television, Claude distinguished himself as one of the most successful studio trumpet players and gained a reputation as "the trumpet player who never misses." Claude died from cancer.

There have been a lot of “modern” trumpet players who were excellent soloists, such as Louis Armstrong (1901 – 1971), one of the first well known improvisational soloists; Dizzy Gillespie (1917 – 1993) “be bop” soloist with excellent high note range (shown with upturned trumpet bell); Miles Davis (1926 – 1991), perhaps the greatest trumpet jazz soloist (shown with sun glasses); and Maynard Ferguson (1928 – 2006), big band leader and soloist known for his high notes (shown).

There are a lot more—both classical and jazz trumpet players. Notable jazz trumpet players include Chet Baker, Clifford Brown, Donald Byrd, Jon Faddis, Roy Hargrove, Tom Harrell, Freddie Hubbard, Wynton Marsalis, Blue Mitchell, Lee Morgan and more and more.

To me, Clifford Brown seems to have been one of the most “studied” of some of these trumpet players, although I am only going on the sound of his solos. Clifford Brown (1930 – 1956), died at age 25, leaving behind only four years' worth of recordings. Still, he had a considerable influence on some of those other jazz trumpet players. He won the 1954 Down Beat critics' poll for the 'New Star of the Year' and was inducted into the Down Beat 'Jazz Hall of Fame' in 1972. He formed his own group with Max Roach. The Clifford Brown & Max Roach Quintet was a high water mark of the hard bop style.

The clean-living Brown has been cited as perhaps breaking the influence of heroin on the jazz world, a model established by Charlie Parker. Clifford stayed away from drugs and was not fond of alcohol. Sadly, in 1956, Brown was a passenger in a car and was killed with two others when the driver lost control of the car and it went off the road.

But Jon Faddis (born 1953) has got to be one of the top, if not the top American jazz trumpet player, particularly in the combined areas of technique and high note screaming. You’ve got to hear his music. At least, that’s my opinion. Faddis is a trumpet player, conductor, composer, and educator. The internet states that Faddis currently teaches at The Conservatory of Music at Purchase College-SUNY, in Westchester, New York and he is a guest lecturer at Columbia College Chicago where he serves as the Artistic Director for the Chicago Jazz Ensemble. I’d say he’s pretty “studied.” I’d even bet he studied trumpet techniques out of Arban’s and Saint-Jacome’s at one point.

Thelonious Monk

Our jazz quintet plays a lot of songs by Thelonious Monk-- Well You Needn't, Straight No Chaser, Misterioso, In Walked Bud, Let's Cool One, Blue Monk, I Mean You, and 'Round Midnight. Monk's songs sound unique, and I wanted to learn more about him.

Thelonious Monk lived 1917 through 1982, so he died at age 65. He was jazz pianist and composer, considered one of the giants of American music. Some have said he invented "bebop," but I think he's a lot bigger than that. He wrote about 70 songs.

"His compositions and improvisations are full of dissonant harmonies and angular melodic twists."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelonious_Monk


There's an excellent biography about Thelonious Sphere Monk written by Robin D. G. Kelley titled Thelonious Monk, The Life and Times of an American Original (2009). It's hard to imagine how a book about a jazz musician can be a "page-turner," but it is, at least for this reader.


Monk's melody lines and harmonies are very distinctive, and I wondered if his song writing and improvisation came naturally or if he really had to study and think. The answer is probably "both." But, (as am amateur musician) I was relieved to learn that he practiced a lot. A lot.

Kelley writes how Monk, working his way through "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You," the theme song for Tommy Dorsey's Orchestra, sounded on a recording of his practice--


The first take is painstaking; in five minutes, he gets through just one chorus of the melody. As he wrestles with each measure, every note in his reinterpretation of the melody is carefully placed. By the second take, played rubato (out of tempo), there are more alternations to the melody and increasingly dissonant harmonies. Toward the end of this take, Thelonious begins to integrate stride piano and improvises for the first time . . . The fourth, fifth, and sixth takes, which together add up to a little over an hour of continuous playing, are an exercise in discovery. Monk works through a wide range of improvised figures in a fairly systematic way. He repeats certain phrases, making small rhythmic and tonal alterations each time to see how they sound. . . [This] represents a fraction of what it took to transform "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You" into a Monk original.

Monk played with all the other great jazz musicians through the 1940's to 1970's-- tenor sax players Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane, trumpet players Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davie, alto sax player Charlie Parker, and drummers Art Blakey and Max Roach. There are many, many more.

(That's Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge and Teddy Hill outside Minton's).

It's probably safe to say that Monk's genius was under-appreciated, and there were many times when he couldn't get gigs. He was prohibited from performing in New York for a period because of a minor drug conviction. But, some of Monk's troubles were caused by a then undefined mental illness. Monk was hospitalized on several occasions due to an unspecified mental illness that worsened in the late 1960s. No reports or diagnoses were ever publicized, but Monk would often become excited for two or three days, pace for days after that, after which he would withdraw and stop speaking. It may have been manic depression or schizophrenia, or he may have been bipolar.

On February 28, 1964, Monk appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and was featured in an article inside.


















Here's some of what author Kelley writes about Monk's music--

Monk's unique sound has a lot to do with how he voiced his chords. As early as 1941, he was already experimenting with "open" voicing-- i.e. sometimes playing just the root and seventh of a dominant or major seventh chord, eliminating the third and fifth. The impact on the ear is quite startling. A standard major seventh voicing with the root on the bottom- C-E-G-B -sounds consonant, but remove the E and G and suddenly you have a highly dissonant chord, because the two remaining notes are only a half-tone away from each other. Invert the chord and you have a minor second. Often he would eliminate the root altogether and just play the seventh or the ninth in the bass.

Also, Monk was given credit for introducing the half-diminished chord, a minor seventh chord with a diminished or "flat" fifth (e.g. C-Eb-Gb-Bb). It became an essential element of Monk's harmonic language, partly because of the dissonance created by the C-Gb. That flatted fifth or "tritone" was critical to what would become his harmonic signature.

KNEW Spokane

In 1963 Jimmy Soul had a hit song called "If You Wanna Be Happy."



My early-teen-aged buddies and I listened to the song on Spokane's "top 40" radio station KNEW. Some of the lyrics went like this--

If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life
Never make a pretty woman your wife
So for my personal point of view
Get an ugly girl to marry you

A pretty woman makes her husband look small
And very often causes his downfall
As soon as he married her and then she starts
To do the things that will break his heart

But if you make an ugly woman your wife
Ah' you'll be happy for the rest of your life
An ug-a-ly woman cooks meals on time
And she'll always give you peace of mind

Well . . . we weren't quite sure the last phrase really said . . . she'll always give you peace of mind. Sometimes it sounded like . . . she'll always give you a piece of (unintelligible). AM radio stations seemed to have some interfering static right then, but we knew what we heard. Either that, or there was some other reason the lyrics weren't 100% clear to us.

We didn't know Jimmy Soul's telephone number or where he lived, but we did know the whereabouts of the KNEW broadcasting station. It was on Moran Prairie-- just a couple of miles from our homes and just about 30 minutes away by bicycle. So, we decided to ride up there and ask Larry Lujack-- probably the most famous disc jockey among the Spokane teenagers-- Just what was the oracle Jimmy Soul singing?



KNEW (now KJRB) was started as KVNI in 1946 when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a license to the Coeur d'Alene (Idaho) Broadcasting Company. In 1947, the company moved to Spokane and changed the call sign to KNEW. The studios were in downtown Spokane but were then moved south to Moran Prairie in 1954. The studio was just adjacent to the transmitter. http://spokaneradio.philcobill.com/knew/index.php



Larry Lujack was born in 1940 in Idaho (as Larry Blankenburg). He started working as a disc jockey in Idaho at age 18. He was at KNEW Radio in Spokane (now KJRB) from 1962-64. After that he went to Seattle's KJR until 1966. He then went back east to work, primarily at WLS in Chicago (20+ years). He’s been a radio star in the Chicago area since first arriving there more than 40 years ago. Lujack chronicled his career in his 1975 autobiography "Superjock." Although he retired in 1987, he's continued to do some remote broadcasts since. He lives in New Mexico.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Lujack
http://www.museum.tv/rhofsection.php?page=230

Anyway, we rode our bicycles to the KNEW studios on Moran Prairie. We went right up to the window and could see Larry Lujack working away at the microphone. The music was piped to speakers outside. We knocked on the glass. During a song Lujack came to the back door and we asked our question. I think he was smoking a cigarette-- or maybe my buddy was smoking one. Larry Lujack chuckled and gave us an answer and then went back inside. We rode away. The mystery of the "true" lyrics is still unsolved. (Listen to the record and you'll hear what I'm talking about).

Jimmy Soul was born in 1942 (as James McCleese) in North Carolina. He performed gospel music as a teenager. He was discovered and recruited to sing songs which had been handpicked for-- but rejected by-- Gary U.S. Bonds ("Quarter To Three"). Jimmy Soul only had two hit singles, both of which were Bond's cast-offs-- "Twistin' Matilda" (1962) and "If You Wanna Be Happy" (1963) which became a Billboard Hot 100 number one hit. Jimmy Soul was unable to follow up the success of those two songs, so he gave up his career as a musician and joined the US Army. He died of a heart attack in 1988 at age 46.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Soul

Arthur Zepp

Arthur Zepp is a tough one to find information about on the internet. He was a professional pianist and music teacher. Towards the end of his career he lived in Spokane. I took piano lessons from him for about two years in the early 1960s. He had some talented students, of whom I was not one. Yet, I hung around long enough to learn about basic chords, which has served me well enough over the years.

http://issuu.com/boxoffice/docs/boxoffice_071445/77 --

The July 15, 1945 issue of Box Office Magazine, in an article titled “Hollywood At War,” states that on July 4th, more than 350,000 people gathered under the Washington Monument to see a troupe of Hollywood stars give an hour and 40 minute performance. It was the biggest war bond rally up to that date. Performers on that bill included Lucille Ball and Dinah Shore.

Meanwhile, some lesser stars performed their first break-in show at the Long Beach Naval Hospital-- included was Arthur Zepp.

http://issuu.com/boxoffice/docs/boxoffice_101345/53 --

The October 13, 1945 issue of Box Office Magazine, in an Article titled “Camp Show on Top Deck of a Carrier” reports that a group of Hollywood entertainers turned the flight deck of an aircraft carrier into a theatre when they played to warship crews at Los Angeles Harbor. The troupe included Dell Chain as emcee, dancer Virginia Carroll, guitarist Amy Lou Welch, soprano Lillian Gilbert, and pianist Arthur Zepp.

Let's see . . . that means that I took piano lessons for a short time from a piano teacher who almost two decades earlier belonged to the same organization as Lucille Ball and Dinah Shore. I wonder if-- when dancing, telling jokes and singing under the Washington Monument in 1945-- they were thinking that twenty years later a pianist in their organization would be giving piano lessons to an average kid in Spokane? Maybe. It's possible.

Anyway, Arthur Zepp was a legend in Spokane. He even showed me a picture of himself in Life Magazine. I guess we were taking a break from my piano playing. Imagine what he was thinking at that exact moment. This is the best picture I've found of Arthur Zepp.

The caption to this photo states-- "'The Serenaders' radio broadcast on KHQ radio (Spokane, Washington). Ensemble is conducted by Arthur Zepp." There is no date, but logic puts it some time between 1945 and 1965.

http://www.lib.umd.edu/LAB/JERRYLEE/bands/00000034.html

Oh, yeah-- Here are two photographs of some of the piano books he published and had me buy so I could learn those basic chords. Well worth the money-- I learned something about improvisation and soloing. That, and I came so close to performing with Hollywood's Lucille Ball and Dinah Shore.

Peter Gunn

Peter Gunn was a television program from 1958 through 1961. A total of 114 thirty-minute episodes were produced. Gunn was a private eye (private investigator).

The main character Peter Gunn was played by Craig Stevens (1918 - 2000). Gunn was different than the other television detectives on television during that period because he was "hip" and a smart dresser who loved "cool jazz." He operated in a city on a waterfront some place and was a regular patron of a club on the wharf called "Mother's."

The soundtrack of the show used modern jazz music. Most television shows at that time did not. Henry Mancini composed and performed the opening and closing "Peter Gunn Theme." The soundtrack album by Henry Mancini reached Number One in Billboard's Pop LP Charts.


Some of the song titles are Peter Gunn, Sorta Blue, The Brothers Go to Mother's, A Profound Gas, Walkin' Bass, and The Floater. "The Floater" is one of my favorites.

The song "Peter Gunn" was a hit and was soon being played by junior and senior high school bands in the early 1960s. I was in junior high school at the time. Henry Mancini was a star and traveling around the country. We went to hear him perform at Eastern Washington State College (now a university) in Cheney. He used local musicians from EWSC and other colleges. After the show, we went back stage and shook his hand and talked to him for a couple of minutes. It was "real cool."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gunn

Henry Mancini (1924 - 1994) studied at Julliard School of Music in New York before he was drafted in the Army in 1943. After discharge he became pianist and arranger for the newly re-formed Glenn Miller Orchestra led by Tex Beneke. Mancini wrote the sound tracks for more than 100 movies, recorded over 90 albums, and wrote for just as many television shows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Mancini

Chet Baker

Chet Baker was a trumpet player who reached his peak in the 1950s while in his mid-20s. He's mostly known for playing west coast "cool jazz." He was born in 1929 and died in 1988 at the age of 58.

I never listened to his music when I was younger, but learned of him in a roundabout way. I'd learned to play the trumpet in the early 1960s and played all the John Phillip Sousa marches and the songs from musicals like Oklahoma and Music Man. Screeching out those tunes on a trumpet didn't feel and sound as "cool" as I wanted. That, and I wanted to know something more about jazz. (We grew up with all types of music in our home, including records of trumpet players Shorty Rogers and Jonah Jones).



So, I bought an edition of Down Beat Magazine and, from an ad in the back, purchased a short fake book containing some simple jazz licks I could play on the horn for a couple of seconds. There was also an article about Chet Baker in that edition of Down Beat. I don't recall the date of the magazine, but it surely was in the early 1960s, a little past Chet Baker's prime.


Chet Baker had some talent. Readers of Down Beat voted each year in the "Readers' Poll" for the best musicisian on each instrument. The results for trumpet player in each of the following years were-- Maynard Ferguson (1952), Chet Baker (1953), Chet Baker (1954), Miles Davis (1955) and Dizzy Gilliespie (1956). (Miles Davis won a lot of later polls). So, you can see Chet had some chops. After his death in 1988, Chet Baker was admitted to the Down Beat Magazine "Hall of Fame" (1989).

In 1946, at age 16, Chet left high school and enlisted and joined the US Army Band in Germany. He was out in two years to study music, but then re-enlisted in 1950. He discharged again to pursue music. In California in 1951, he played with tenor sax player Stan Getz and alto sax player Charlie Parker. In 1952, Baker joined with baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan, but that didn't last too long because Mullligan was arrested on drug charges.

As with a lot of great jazz musicians, drugs took control of Chet Baker's life and music. He started using heroin in the 1950s. He pawned his instruments for drug money. He served prison time in Italy, and was expelled from some European countires due to drug offenses. After returning to California, Chet did some jail time for prescription forgeries. He lost his teeth (whether because he was severely beaten while trying to buy drugs after a gig in San Francisco, or whether because his teeth had just rotted due to heavy drug use) and had to learn to play with dentures. He made a come back of sorts in the 1980s. In 1988, his body was found on the street below his second-story room in Amsterdam. There were drugs in his system and in the room.

As always, it's hard to understand why a guy with so much talent will throw it all away for drugs. I know some musicians and artists argue that they are most creative while high, but I doubt that it's true in the long run. And, some say that great musicians and artists need drugs to cope with their own genius. Maybe, but I don't want to believe that, either.




The bulk of this information comes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chet_Baker

Anyway, that's the story of one trumpet player.