something I am grateful for today
Oct. 17th, 2017 12:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johncomiclearning to love the trumpet
For whatever reason, trumpet was a sound I didn't dig as much as many others in jazz, such as sax, piano, or bass. This despite the fact that the trumpet is demonstrably the core of jazz! The first musician to be identified as a jazz player, Buddy Bolden, played trumpet. The single most influential, definitive, and iconic figure in the history of the music, Louis Armstrong, played trumpet. But trumpets simply didn't grab me. On most recordings, if you took them away I wouldn't miss them much.
Oh sure, there were a couple of exceptions: Miles Davis to begin with, then later Lester Bowie, then Chris Botti, then Harry James. These were guys whose sounds I actively loved. But lately, what with my ongoing Blue Note Binge®, I am hearing a lot more trumpet and it's finally sinking in. Not only players whom I previously sorta-noticed as sorta-sounding good, such as Clifford Brown and Lee Morgan, but also players of long standing whom I somehow managed to ignore all these decades but who are delighting me now, such as Donald Byrd and Blue Mitchell. Now when I fire up a Blue Note and a trumpet kicks in, my tail wags!
For whatever reason, trumpet was a sound I didn't dig as much as many others in jazz, such as sax, piano, or bass. This despite the fact that the trumpet is demonstrably the core of jazz! The first musician to be identified as a jazz player, Buddy Bolden, played trumpet. The single most influential, definitive, and iconic figure in the history of the music, Louis Armstrong, played trumpet. But trumpets simply didn't grab me. On most recordings, if you took them away I wouldn't miss them much.
Oh sure, there were a couple of exceptions: Miles Davis to begin with, then later Lester Bowie, then Chris Botti, then Harry James. These were guys whose sounds I actively loved. But lately, what with my ongoing Blue Note Binge®, I am hearing a lot more trumpet and it's finally sinking in. Not only players whom I previously sorta-noticed as sorta-sounding good, such as Clifford Brown and Lee Morgan, but also players of long standing whom I somehow managed to ignore all these decades but who are delighting me now, such as Donald Byrd and Blue Mitchell. Now when I fire up a Blue Note and a trumpet kicks in, my tail wags!
