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Trumpet festival sound the horns
The Festival of New Trumpet Music challenges the belief that the instrument belongs only in certain niches of the jazz world
BY STEVE DOLLAR
Steve Dollar is a freelance writer.
August 7, 2005
If someone only thought of the trumpet in terms of Dixieland parades or Miles Davis slinking in silhouette, they'd be in for a lot of surprises this month. This most fundamental of jazz instruments is not merely a sidekick to the saxophone. It's still pivotal to the music's evolution, a century after Buddy Bolden began blowing cornet - the trumpet's first cousin - in the whorehouses of New Orleans.
To prove it, a trio of trumpeters has put together a 26-day series of concerts showing off the full range of the horn. They've rounded up some of the city's most distinctive players, and looked far beyond traditional repertoires. The Festival of New Trumpet Music, which runs through Aug. 27 at a variety of Manhattan venues, argues for the vibrancy of the brass.
"If we go back to Louis Armstrong, the trumpet was the lead instrument," said Roy Campbell Jr., who founded the event two summers ago with fellow jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas. They have since invited a third colleague, Jon Nelson of the chamber group Meridian Arts Ensemble, to help them curate the festival. "I think the trumpet is once again coming more into the vanguard."
Armstrong invented jazz as we know it when he first uncorked improvisations in a group context in the mid-1920s. Thirty years later, Davis codified the horn as a symbol of his own detached cool and mercurial intellect. Since the 1980s, Wynton Marsalis has been the world's best-known trumpeter, thanks partly to his institutional platform at Jazz at Lincoln Center.
The point of FONT, as its organizers call the festival, is to reject such tidy summaries. Rather than dwell on the history of the instrument, it offers perspectives on its future. Though many of the artists on the roster may be familiar to New York jazz fans, more than half of the fest's 48 performances feature emerging players. Styles are all over the map.
Much is recognizably jazz, both arranged and improvised, acoustic and electronic. But there are intriguing deviations. Pre-jazz traditions are evoked, for instance, by the Balkan brass of the band Zlatne Uste. Post-jazz directions are suggested by an evening of so-called "lower-case music," in which the trumpet is manipulated to create uncharacteristic sounds.
"I got sick of hearing that there's only two kinds of trumpet players," said Douglas, a prolific composer and bandleader who often sees his name juxtaposed with that of Marsalis, as if they were the flip sides of a coin. "You know, outside and inside," he added, using jazz lingo for musicians who slip free of standard form, or remain steadfast about familiar musical structure. "Each trumpeter we present is a completely unique world unto themselves. This is the time to expose how broad this music is, and break down some of the boxes people put it into."
Silent film inspiration
Douglas, who leads several bands, is a good example of such expansiveness. His festival appearances include the debut of his latest project, Keystone, which plays themes inspired by silent-film star Fatty Arbuckle (with a DJ on board), and a performance by Nomad, which is more like a chamber group.
Campbell is less overtly conceptual, but boasts a thrilling range. He's as adept at soulful simmer as he is at heady bluster. Both factor into his Pyramid Trio. Campbell will showcase the group, which loosely weaves African and Asian themes through his free-floating solos. The music draws at once on gutsy hard-bop and the more ethereal legacy of the late Don Cherry, a globe-trotting fusionist.
"People have their set impressions about the trumpet," said co-curator Nelson, whose ensemble commissions new pieces for its chamber concerts, and has adapted the music of Frank Zappa for brass. "It's either part of an orchestra, or it's played by one or two famous jazz musicians who are doing traditional music. But people are doing very creative things."
The festival has been resourceful with its limited funding, boosted this year with support from the American Music Center. The grassroots enterprise began in 2003 as a monthlong series at Tonic, a Lower East Side club that will host performances Friday through Aug. 15. Each year the festival grows more ambitious. Spark, a new black-box space on West 22nd Street, will present shows Aug. 16-20. And Yamaha, the Japanese corporation that manufactures musical instruments and audio equipment, has turned over its Artist Services Center in midtown for a closing week of concerts and seminars focusing on so-called "post-classical" chamber-music hybrids.
FONT even found a mainstream platform this year. The Jazz Standard, a blue-chip club owned by celebrity chef Danny Meyer, downstairs from his Blue Smoke restaurant, has been staging the opening run of concerts, which concludes tonight. Those shows, dedicated to charismatic trumpeter Lester Bowie, who died in 1999, were no less idiosyncratic than the rest. They spotlighted trumpeters' trumpeters, forceful and such influential players as Herb Robertson and West Coast legend Bobby Bradford.
Most performances, however, will not benefit from marquee billing. "A lot of people are playing for the door [receipts]," Nelson said, "which means they will end up playing for nothing. But the draw is that they have a forum where they can play whatever they want. There are no restrictions."
Though it does a good job of showing off some of the leading talents who work just outside the jazz mainstream, the festival is not particularly bound to the avant-garde canon. "We want to blur all the lines," Nelson said. "It's easy for people to put things in a box. When events like this are institutional, it's the death of something that could have had some interesting possibilities."
"Challenge the aesthetics"
He cited an Aug. 20 triple bill at Spark as an example of that philosophy. The show will feature experimental players Greg Kelley, Nate Wooley and Peter Evans. "Evans makes sounds on the trumpet that are unbelievable," Nelson said. "When I heard Nate play, it sounded like electric guitar, and he wasn't using a processor. This is where we have hope, with people who challenge the aesthetics of music. When they get up and play, it's very powerful."
Another example is a concert that juxtaposes entire universes of trumpet concepts. An Aug. 24 billing will showcase Jeremy Pelt, a gifted 28-year-old with a classic ballad style, and an ensemble led by Graham Ashton, a middle-aged Briton whose group boasts several leading symphonic brass players. "We try to pair up things you would not likely see on the same program," Nelson said. "We want to take categorization out of the whole presentation. If you want to have any kind of future at all, this is how you do it."
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 6, 2005 Saturday
JAZZ REVIEW | FESTIVAL OF NEW TRUMPET MUSIC
Memories as Bold as Brass
By BEN RATLIFF
The Festival of New Trumpet Music has become a contender among New York's jazz-concert series. "Jazz" is my shorthand, actually; a piece of official Web literature defines the festival's purview as "jazz, improvised, post-classical, electronic and other undefinable worlds of current musical culture." But jazz, in the widest sense, is basically at the center.
With no corporate sponsor and hardly any advertising, the festival operates guerrilla style, aiming partly at trumpeters but largely for anyone. It consists of concerts and master classes, spread through August in four clubs and performance spaces; it is run by the trumpeters Dave Douglas, Roy Campbell Jr. and Jon Nelson.
On Thursday night at the Jazz Standard, where the festival has a home base through tomorrow, Mr. Douglas played with one of his new bands, Brass Ecstasy. The quintet's name intentionally recalls Lester Bowie's old band Brass Fantasy: the concerts at the club are all dedicated to Bowie, a founder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, who died in 1999. Bowie always kept his options open, bringing in pop and classical modernism when he wanted to, and the festival's organizers see him as a model soldier in the war against aesthetic reductionism.
But they're not missing his humor. Brass Ecstasy had Mr. Douglas on trumpet, Ray Anderson and Clark Gayton on trombones, Marcus Rojas on tuba and Gene Lake on drums. At the climax of the set, the other musicians quieted down to watch Mr. Rojas stretch out during a version of Otis Redding's "Mr. Pitiful." He rode on the rhythm and used some of Bowie's old brass language, kissing and harrumphing and groaning through the mouthpiece. Finally he couldn't help cracking up.
It was benign, physical, groove-heavy comedy, much more floppy than Mr. Douglas's usual watertight ideal. And its emphasis was on repertory and tributes. The band also covered a medley of three Missy Elliott songs ("I'm Not Perfect," "Can't Stop" and "We Run This," with its interpolation of the brass line from the old hip-hop anthem "Apache"), a Hank Williams tune and some originals written in remembrance of Bowie and Steve Lacy.
Following Brass Ecstasy was a band led by the trumpeter Corey Wilkes, who has replaced Bowie in the Art Ensemble of Chicago. A quartet of young Chicagoans called Abstrakt Pulse, with a more common trumpet-tenor saxophone-bass-drums lineup, it worked through long jazz grooves and funk bounces, working in bits of reggae and Afrobeat here and there, including a version of Fela Kuti's "Water No Get Enemy." (There's a Lester Bowie connection there, too: Bowie once traveled to Nigeria and recorded a few albums with Fela.) It was back-to-the-70's stuff, but Mr. Wilkes is a battling musician, and charismatic; for a stretch he put two trumpets to his lips and soloed through both at once, making glancing references to old bebop tunes.
The Festival of New Trumpet Music continues through tomorrow night at the Jazz Standard, 117 East 27th Street, Manhattan; (212) 576-2232. Next week it moves to Tonic, 107 Norfolk Street, Lower East Side; (212) 358-7501. Full schedule:
www.fontmusic.org.