This has always been one of my favorite jazz genres. I mean it was the first sort of rock I heard. Although my mother was a very capable singer with a beautiful voice, the music available in the household was fairly limited, Perry Como, Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole. Soft stuff, you know. No Elvis or Beatles or anything close. When I started playing the trumpet, I gravitated to the trumpet records by Louis Armstrong, Al Hirt, and of course the old ‘Echoes of an Era’ Maynard Ferguson Orchestra stuff. So, when my friends showed up one day with the Bill Chase ‘Pure Music’ album, I was completely blown away. Mind you, I was all of 12 years old at the time. To this day, that is still one of my favorites. Although, I now find myself listening to Bill Chase’s ‘Ennea’ album more than the others. Strange what age will do to you! I mean if you want a practice work out, start transcribing and playing some of that stuff. Four highly skilled trumpet players playing just absolutely amazing. Songs like Poseidon and Zeus. Oh yeah!

Bill was the godfather of Jazz Rock or Fusion as its now called. Nothing else has ever come close to the awesome sound he created with his group, ‘Chase.’ Speaking of the ‘godfather,’ Bill Chase’s original family name is a true Italian one, Chiaiese (key-ah-tze). His father, however, decided to simplify it to Chase. Prior to forming ‘Chase,’ Bill paid his dues playing lead with the big bands of Stan Kenton, Maynard Ferguson and Woody Herman. Trumpet was not Bill’s first instrument. Rather, he started as a drummer. Sometime in the middle of High School, Bill decided he had had enough of carrying a heavy bass drum in parades. His father had played trumpet and so he started playing his father’s horn and took to it quickly.

Bill was truly an innovator both as a lead player and of course with his own group. His creations were legendary. Unfortunately he was taken from us too soon. He died in a plane crash between gigs in August of 1974.

So, when I discovered recently that all three of his albums are available in a cd set through Amazon I was euphoric, to say the least. Check this out, this is an absolute must have for trumpet fans.

Trumpet Dude salutes one of the best today, Happy Birthday Kenny! Yes, Kenny Dorham was one of the best voices to ever travel the trajectories of a trumpet. While his playing voice was incredible, he never received the accolades he should have from the jazz establishment, always overshadowed by the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, Clifford Brown and Fats Navarro. Perhaps this is simply because he didn’t have a flamboyant personality like the others. I can only speculate, but in fact, he was referred to as ‘quiet Kenny.’ Regardless, his playing has stood the test of time and is now considered some of the best and a must listen for any aspiring jazz trumpeter today. I myself had not heard of Kenny until trumpeter Dave Scott turned me on to him some years ago, asserting that Kenny was his favorite. To this day, I am utterly amazed and challenged by the music that Kenny composed in his improvisations.

Kenny grew up in south Texas and began to teach himself piano and trumpet during High School. During High School he also spent a lot of time on the school boxing team. He studied chemistry and physics in college and was drafted into the Army in 1942. By 1945 he was playing in the first Dizzy Gillespie big band. Thereafter, he played with other great jazz players and leaders including Billy Eckstine, Lionel Hampton, Mercer Ellington and also the BeBop Boys (aka 52nd Street Boys).

Kenny was a wonderful composer. He composed and arranged several great pieces including, “Okay for Baby” for Lucky Millinder and Benny Carter, and “Malibu” for Cootie Williams. He also did ghosting arrangements for the infamous Gil Fuller that were sold to several name big bands, including Harry James, Jimmy Dorsey, and Gene Krupa. He is also remembered for writing the jazz standard, ‘Blue Bossa.’

In late 1948, Kenny replaced Miles Davis in the Charlie Parker quintet where he continued to play for a year or so. This group played together at the Paris Jazz Fair in 1949. Following that gig, Kenny did free lance work in New York playing alongside many greats including the brilliant players and composers Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk.

Twice in his playing career Kenny replaced trumpeter Clifford Brown. First, for Art Blakey’s group the ‘Jazz Messengers,’ in 1954, when Clifford formed the infamous quintet with Max Roach (Brown/Roach Quintet) and then replacing him in that same group in late 1956 when Clifford tragically died in an auto accident.

Kenny also headed several of his own groups including a group he named the ‘Jazz Prophets.’ A notable player that joined one of Kenny’s groups was a young tenor saxophonist, Joe Henderson, who was 26 when he teamed up with Kenny in 1963. They formed a long lasting friendship and were quite prolific producing many fine pieces for Blue Note and Prestige, including my favorite, ‘Una Mas.’ This documented period also reveals Kenny playing with up and comer, Herbie Hancock.

During his short life, Kenny also wrote several great and insightful reviews for the jazz magazine, ‘Downbeat.’

Happy Birthday, Kenny!!

Arthur Stewart Farmer, August 21, 1928 – October 4, 1999.

 I would like to say a special Happy Birthday to one of my personal mentors, Art Farmer. Art began performing as a jazz trumpeter in the 1940’s and 50’s. He, along with Clark Terry, was influential in bringing the flugelhorn into the sounds of jazz. He also later played what I just learned was called a Flumpet, a combination trumpet and flugelhorn designed for him by David Monette.

In the mid 40’s he started playing professionally in Los Angeles, California with the bands of Johnny Otis, Roy Porter, Benny Carter and Jay McShann and others. Many of these groups also featured his identical twin brother and bass player Addison Farmer. In 1953 he joined the Lionel Hampton orchestra, playing alongside trumpeters Clifford Brown and Quincy Jones. During his career he played with many of the jazz greats, including Gigi Gryce, Horace Silver, Gerry Mulligan, Benny Golson and McCoy Tyner, among others. Art played in a trio with Jim Hall and Steve Swallow during 1962-64. In 1968, Art moved to Vienna where he joined the Austrian Radio Orchestra, worked with the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band and toured Europe with his own groups. In the 1980s Farmer began to visit the United States more often and remained greatly in demand up until his death on October 4, 1999.

Art played beautifully lyrical and inventive passages that really produced a unique complimentary quality to his bop oriented music. Art left us with a large number of quality recordings to enjoy.

Mathias has previously worked with the divergent likes of Chick Corea and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra to Norwegian psychedelic rock band Motorpsycho.

Trumpeter Mathias Eick, in the first album released under his own name, ‘The Door,’ captures all the qualities that have made him a musician to be reckoned with in and around jazz for the last decade. ‘The Door’ is distinguished by vaulting lyricism and clear-edged melodies, a strong sense of ambient space in the writing, and edge and excitement and open improvisation.

You also might want to acquire some of the work Mathias did with the jazz rock group Jaga Jazzist.

Louis had a few nicknames, ‘Satchel Mouth’, which was shortened along the way to ‘Satchmo’, and ‘Pops’, which is what he called anyone who wasn’t a musician. Louis referred to all musicians as “cats.”

Although I didn’t know it at the time, Louis really gained his fame during the numerous years he spent in my hometown of Chicago. I was about six years old when I bought my first Louis Armstrong record. Man, I’ll never forget that sound. The ‘cat’ could blow! I also remember watching him on the television a short time later, seeing his wide eyes and that huge smile. Sometime later, I saw another television segment that I will always recall. Louis was shown practicing well after his performance had ended in a back area of the venue, proclaiming how it was so important for him to practice. It always stuck with me that if you wanted to be good, you had to practice well into the night!

Louis grew up quite poor in New Orleans, and ended up in a reform school, where he played cornet and ultimately led the programs band. Louis apparently bought his first cornet for five dollars with money loaned to him by the Karnofskys, a Russian-Jewish immigrant family who had a junk hauling business and gave him odd jobs. To express gratitude towards the Karnofskys, who took him in like a family member, and fed and nurtured him, Armstrong wore a Star of David pendant around his neck for the rest of his life. (Karnow, Stanley – “My Debt to Cousin Louis’s Cornet“, The New York Times, February 21, 2001)

After making it through his rough upbringing, Louis, having become a talented cornetist, attended many performances of his elders, played in the brass bands and riverboats of New Orleans and traveled up and down the Mississippi on the steamboats playing with Fate Marable. Louis termed his time with Marable as going to the “university,” because of the sights and the written arrangements he encountered.

Louis became popular because of his time in Chicago with King Oliver’s ‘Creole Jazz Band.’ While Louis later credited King Oliver for being responsible for his trumpet playing abilities, it is reported that William ‘Bunk’ Johnson was really the ‘dude’ that taught him how to play. Apparently, the person that really should be attributed to be the King of Jazz Trumpet was King Buddy Bolden. It is said that Bolden had a sort of ‘stomp’ style of trumpet playing. Bunk, who played with Bolden added fast finger work and high note runs with good tone. Louis who learned how to play from Bunk combined the two styles into his own. Many of the old cats of that era would say that there were three cornet players, Bolden, Bunk and Louis. In an old Downbeat magazine interview Louis is noted as corroborating this quote from Bunk, “When I would be playing with brass bands in the uptown section (of New Orleans), Louis would steal off from home and follow me. During that time, Louis started after me to show him how to blow my cornet. When the band would not be playing, I would let him carry it to please him. How he wanted me to teach him how to play the blues and ‘Ball the Jack’ and ‘Animal Ball,’ ‘Circus Day, Take It Away’ and ‘Didn’t He Ramble?’ and out of all those pieces he liked the blues the best. I took a job playing in a tonk for Dago Tony on Perdido and Franklin street and Louis used to slip in there and get on the music stand behind the piano. He would fool around with my cornet every chance he got. I showed him just how to hold it and place it to his mouth, and he did so, and it wasn’t long before he began getting a good tone out of my horn. Then I began showing him just how to start the blues, and little by little he began to understand.” “Now here is the year Louis started. It was in the latter part of 1911 as close as I can think. Louis was about 11 years old. Now I’ve said a lot about my boy Louis and just how he started playing cornet. He started playing it by head.”

After playing with the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band for a few years, his wife at the time, Lil Hardin Armstrong,  began to bill him in publicity, much to his surprise, as the ‘greatest trumpet player of all time.’ After playing in New York for a year or so with the first rate Fletcher Henderson Orchestra with personnel like Coleman Hawkins on tenor saxophone, with prodding by his wife, Louis returned to Chicago. Lil wanted to increase her husband’s popularity and earnings. Louis started his own band around 1925. “At first he was actually a member of the Lil Hardin Armstrong Band and working for his wife. He began recording under his own name for Okeh with his famous Hot Five and Hot Seven groups, producing hits such as “Potato Head Blues”, “Muggles” (a reference to marijuana, for which Armstrong had a lifelong fondness), and “West End Blues”, the music of which set the standard and the agenda for jazz for many years to come.” (Wikipedia, Louis Armstrong)

In 1947, as times changed, Louis disbanded his big band and formed the smaller group known as the ‘Louis Armstrong Allstars.’ He toured the world for 20 some years and earned the honorary title, ‘America’s Ambassador.’

Over the years, Louis also came to be known as a singer. He had a very unique singing style and in 1964 won a Grammy for Best Male Vocal on his song ‘Hello Dolly.’ He also sang a style of singing called ‘scat.’ Scat is a singing style that doesn’t contain real words, just made up ones. His singing ability was probably fortuitous for Louis, because it is reported that at times he couldn’t play his trumpet due to the excessive pressue that he played with and the problems it caused his chops. The ‘Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’ listed the song ‘West End Blues’ by Armstrong on the list of 500 songs that shaped Rock and Roll.

In addition to his successful run on Broadway with the production, ‘Swinging the Dream,’ Louis appeared on several television shows and in two dozen films, including ‘High Society’ with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, ‘Cabin in the Sky’ and ‘The Five Pennies.’

Attention all you boppers, Louis thought that this new style of music being played by the likes of Dizzy Gillespie was an abomination that would ruin the music business! The headline to an old Downbeat interview with Louis read, “Bop Will Kill Business Unless It Kills Itself First.”

Also of note is that when pressed, and after only writing his own name down, Louis revealed that his favorite trumpet players were Bunny Berigan, Harry James, and Roy Eldridge.

The musical memories that Louis left us with are numerous, and I do mean numerous. His discography will fill a page or two. I encourage you to check out as many of them out as you can. He truly was one of the greatest!

So as I close this piece, I again say ‘Happy Birthday Louis, thanks for the music!’ and I’ll sign this with one of his oft used letter closings.

“Red Beans and Ricely Yours,”
Trumpet Dude

After several other successful projects, Pelt came out with an album entitled, ‘Shock Value.’ A must have for you progressive types that like your jazz with some sizzle and a biting edge. On ‘Shock Value’, Pelt dives deep into the type of electronic gadgetry that Miles experimented with in the early seventies. This is all tastefully done in a way that lets Pelt utilize the artistic tools available to him. This is a live production and a must have in my opinion. After hearing this I definitely need to add a wah-wah peddle to my want list though!

Pelt’s most recent release entitled, ‘November’ is a far different, more refined project than ‘Shock Value.’ It pays homage to the sound of Wayne Shorter circa 1965 but with a modern pulse. With his tightly knit quintet, Pelt once again puts forth beautiful compositions that demonstrate his warmth and depth, each of the nine pieces like a new personal discovery.

You can hear some samples of Mr. Pelt’s work by clicking the links below.

Well, last night, having worked too late into the evening, I wasn’t in the mood for high note antics or the like. You might say I was feeling a bit mellow. Thumbing through some CD’s I hadn’t listened to in a while, I came across ‘Little Johnny C,’ by Johnny Coles. I had forgotten what an experience it is to listen to this cat play. Oh man, I mean his sound lights a fire deep into my spine. Warm but cool, with shades of purple, green and yellow. While Johnny Coles is not a household name in the jazz world, as trumpeters he is one player that you should be familiar with. Johnny grew up in Philadelphia and started playing the trumpet at age ten. He was mostly self-taught, with the extent of his formal music training being received at a vocational high school. He played in army bands during the war years and thereafter began to play in various R&B groups, including Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson’s group, which included John Coltrane. After this period, Johnny hooked up with James Moody and played with his group from 1956-1958. When he left Moody, he began an association with Gil Evans that lasted until 1964. During those years he played on several Evans productions, including several Evans-Davis collaborations, such as ‘Porgy and Bess’ and ‘Sketches of Spain’. Some have commented that his association with Evans deprived him his just dessert and caused him to be seen as merely a Miles Davis understudy. Regardless, Mr. Coles exploited the fullness of his trumpet’s qualities, as he was truly a capable musical colorist that understood how to use a color’s shades well. After separating with Evans, he toured with the Charles Mingus group for a period. There is a Charles Mingus DVD set entitled ‘Live in ’64,’ that contains live footage of the group’s performances in Europe. Johnny also played with Herbie Hancock during 1968-69. A great chart to hear his genius on is entitled, ‘The Prisoner’ on the Herbie Hancock album of the same name. During the remainder of his life, Johnny played with Ray Charles, Duke Ellington and Count Basie, among others. You can enjoy the warm sound of Johnny Coles on these fine productions.

Speaking of Mr. John Birks Gillespie, I read recently that he didn’t always play with his cheeks puffed out, but that as he got older he needed that extra muscular support to assist him.  Anyway, for the younger readers who don’t fully know, Dizzy is remembered as being the forefather and a principal founder of the jazz style known as Bebop and is credited for introducing the Afro Cuban style sounds into jazz. As a trumpeter, Dizzy literally founded an entire school of playing technique with his dazzling flights of notes, employing the entire range of the horn in harmonically intense solos. At some time in or around the early 1950’s, Dizzy began to explore the various music of other countries and cultures of the world. He is universally credited with being the catalyst behind introducing Afro-Cuban, Brazilian and Caribbean music and rhythms into the jazz scene. He felt strongly and stated “jazz celebrates the internationality of music, our common bond.” As an aside, he put himself forward as a presidential candidate in 1964, promising to rename the White House, the Blue House!

 Anyway, recently Gill Fuller has put together a nice remix of a 1965 concert at the Monterey Jazz Festival and has put out a nice two album set featuring the Diz on one and James Moody on another. Gil Fuller’s jazz credentials date back to the late-forties when he was the principal architect of the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band with James Moody. Gil Fuller, an arranger, pulled together the cream of LA’s jazz and studio scenes around 1965 to form the Monterey Jazz Orchestra.  To preserve those great performances, in this recent release entitled, ‘Dizzy Gillespie & James Moody with Gil Fuller & the Monterey Jazz Festival,’ Fuller has pulled choice tunes from bebop, tin-pan-alley, and other contemporary originals of his old friends. The result is some exceptional playing from Gillespie and Moody. Both albums, newly remixed from the original three- and four-track master tapes, are complete on this 75-minute CD. Check this out!