Saturday is for Trumpets

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A Random Thought

Sometimes when I hear a Lee Morgan solo, I wonder if I will ever be fortunate enough to create something so perfect. It's a lofty aspiration.

List: Favorite Tracks From Art Blakey's 1960 Jazz Messengers

All tracks available on the sadly out of print box set from Blue Note.

Ping Pong

Afrique

Lost and Found

A Night In Tunisia

Dat Dere

Sleeping Dancer Sleep On

United

The Freedom Rider

Friday Album Cover: Night of the Cookers

Via @nextbop:

RT @atane Freddie Hubbard & Lee Morgan - The Night of Cookers - Man this joint is sizzling!! #jazz #vinyl http://twitpic.com/1tedk3

April links

I'm not in Paris, but Charlottesville is pretty nice in April, too. Time for some links to wash away the Monday.

• Ethan Iverson on Mal Waldron. I may say this too often, but it bears repeating: if more musicians shared Iverson's zeal for writing, the world (and internet) would be a better place.
• Is Dr. Teeth a jazz muppet? An excellent post with equally incisive comments (mine excluded). 
• Pat Metheny discusses Orchestrion with Philip Booth. I will be reviewing the album and revisiting this Metheny post soon.
• Bop and Beyond is reconsidering the music of Lee Morgan. I was a bit surprised that Christopher did not care for The Sidewinder, but share his enthusiasm for Search for the New Land. Here's Part 2.
• Josh Jackson interviewed Randy Weston last week.
• Jason Parker issued a thoughful piece of media criticism over the weekend.

Out There...

Eric Dolphy
Out There

Sun Ra gets all the credit for fostering an Afronaut aesthetic within jazz, but one look at this cover from Eric Dolphy's 1960 album Out There shows that other musicians were also thinking about boldly going where no man had gone before. The metronome weirdly foreshadows the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, don't you think?

Elsewhere in the jazz world...

• Howard Mandel ponders the dearth of female jazz fans, asking men to perhaps be a bit more inclusive and less misogynistic when it comes to jazz.
• Groove Notes posted an audio interview with Billy Hart on the murder of Lee Morgan.
• Philip Stein, an artist who created the mural that graces the back wall of the Village Vanguard, died last month. He was 90. He was the sister of current Vanguard owner Lorraine Gordon.
  
• You can now listen to archived performances from Smalls Jazz Club online (h/t All Music Blog).
• NPR has started its own jazz blog, and came up with a fantastic name, A Blog Supreme.
  
• Coming Soon! Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute To Miles Davis.
• ESPN.com Special Correspondent Paul Shirley on basketball and jazz. The basketball/jazz comparison can be a bit tired, but Shirley adds new depth to the relationship. Now I have an excuse to post one of my favorite quotes from the American version of The Office. In a deleted scene from episode 1.05 ("Basketball"), Michael Scott ruminates:

  And basketball is like jazz, you know. To like pertipify it there's a jazz musician, a guy, you know... if you know jazz you know who I mean. He's uh, God what was his name? Um, he plays one of those curly horns, like those really shiny curly horns that's used in jazz a lot.

Image via Monthly Top Ten

List: 8 Essential Trumpet Solos

As a budding trumpet player in high school, I listened to a ton of trumpet solos. One of the most rudimentary steps in developing your own style as a jazz musician is to listen to as many other musicians as possible and transcribe their solos. By doing so, you improve your own ear and give yourself somewhat of a stylistic guide that serves as a jumping off point for your own voice. Below is a list of eight trumpet solos which any young musician would do well to transcribe. Some of the choices are rather obvious, and others (hopefully) are not as obvious. Feel free to let me know what I missed in the comments, the list is not meant as the be-all-end-all of jazz trumpet, but merely a starting point. The list is in relatively chronological order.

1. Louis Armstrong, Wild Man Blues, from The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings: West End Blues gets all the attention for its divine opening cadenza, but I always preferred Wild Man Blues. Armstrong remains important to modern trumpet players both for his swagger and humanity, and he packs an abundance of both into this solo.
   
2. Dizzy Gillespie, Shaw 'nuff, on many compilations: Dizzy opened up new worlds for trumpet players, and his solos represent a primer on improvisation for young trumpet players. His work is an important building block for modern jazz trumpet improvisation.
   
3. Miles Davis, Now's The Time, from almost any Charlie Parkercompilation: Certainly there are many important Miles solos to choose from, but I find that learning this solo tends to wean trumpet players off of the habit of playing lots of fast runs and high notes, and gets them to concentrate on melody as well as rhythm and harmony. Miles showed trumpet players during the 1940s that they did not have to play like Dizzy in order to make good jazz, a lesson which is still important.
4. Lee Morgan, Moanin', from Moanin': This is one of the more obvious choices on the list, but there is a reason for that. Morgan distills the entirety of hard bop into this solo, it swings violently, is drenched in the blues, but also reveals a harmonic sophistication that separated the wheat from the chaff of the genre. I could listen to this solo every day for the rest of my life and not get tired of hearing it. This solo is a necessary primer on hard bop for any young musician, trumpet player or not.
   
5. Booker Little, Garvey's Ghost from Percussion Bitter Sweet: Little plays outside the melody and around the changes, giving a new perspective on improvisation that bridges hard bop and free jazz.
   
6. Miles Davis, My Funny Valentine, from The Complete Concert 1964: My Funny Valentine + Four and More: Miles at an artistic peak. He transforms the tune with understatement.
   
7. Freddie Hubbard, "One Finger Snap," from Empyrean Isles:This is my favorite Hubbard solo. Hubbard had incredible chops, which makes transcribing his solos a physical as well as mental challenge. He compels you to improve your technique.
8. Wynton Marsalis, Caravan from Marsalis Standard Time ~ Vol.1: Wynton synthesizes a sizable chunk of jazz history in his earlier work, giving a good intro to neobop improvisation.
   

Now, even considering the fact that there are no solos by Clifford Brown, I think this is a decent place to start. What would you add to or subtract from this list?

Friday Album Cover: A Night in Tunisia

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers
A Night in Tunisia

Note: I know I have been depending a bit too heavily on the Blue Note catalogue for album covers lately, so this will be the final Blue Note title for awhile.

Blue Note was responsible for a number of iconic album covers during the 1950s and 1960s, and while many remember certain albums for their photography or artwork, some albums relied solely on typography. Like other classic Blue Note albums Somethin' Else or In 'N Out, A Night in Tunisia features a simple cover consisting of the band name and album title. I always liked these covers for their understatement. With a group like Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Blue Note did not need to put much on the cover to grab someone's attention at a record shop. Even so, covers like this stick out, and reflect a certain aspect of each album. In this case, the cover's vaguely African color scheme matches Art Blakey's drumming style, in which he synthesized various traditions of African drumming on his drumkit. Besides Lee Morgan's raging solo on the title track (which is quite possibly the best solo on "A Night in Tunisia" ever recorded), this album cover is something that always comes to my mind when I think of this album. No small feat for a simple text design, indeed.