| Re: Trumpeting Diversity!
Speaking of trumpeting diversity, how about Kenny Wheeler? There's a guy who never plays the same note twice, but still maintains a very active practice regimen and has music all the way over the map. What makes him diverse, besides the strange zigs and zags of his tunes (kind of where Hindemith and Don Cherry meet in the middle), is that he is ugly when you expect him to be pretty and breathtakingly lovely where others would be crass or academic. He's cultivated and controlled his own entire vocabulary of absolutely smooth smith-watkins tone with raucous overshoots, and he can sound absolutely wild or impeccably precise at a moment's notice. His albums range from jams to sonatas to orchestral suites to small-group chamber music with the nuance and sophistication of Brahms.
He's a very, very, very quiet and reticent man, and I saw him endure an adoring masterclass of the sort that very quiet men tend to hate. He told a slow story for five minutes for how he found his "voice" as a player. He could "speak" bebop but not as well as the other guys, and he was frustrated and thinking of hanging it up in the late 1960s when he came upon a dingy out of the way empty London club where guys were "going berserk." "And so I went berserk too...and I quite liked it...So I kept coming back there... and kept going berserk."
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