Ted Gioia has a post on a subject near and dear to me, jazz trumpet players: Could Any Other Jazz Trumpeter Match Up with Louis Armstrong in the 1930s? A few paragraphs in:
The reality is that Armstrong’s skill as an entertainer actually makes it more difficult to grasp his musical innovations. He changed the course of American music back in the 1920s by inventing a whole new vocabulary for both instrumental and vocal music. He literally played melodies on the horn nobody had played before—in fact, he invented and performed hundreds of phrases (improvised them, no less!) that redefined the sound and scope of jazz.
But the rest of the jazz world eventually learned to imitate these phrases. Armstrong’s vocabulary became their own, quickly entering the public domain by implication. (Given today’s intellectual property court rulings, Armstrong could have sued for millions.) And that, too, makes it hard for people nowadays to grasp the depth and breadth of his impact.
Today, we’ve all heard those elaborate melodic phrases, filled with color and invigorating rhythmic twists—so we tend to forget that nobody knew how to play them back in 1920.
After some more prose, all of it interesting, Gioia gets around to eight trumpeters. Let’s give them a listen. You’ll have to zip over to Gioia’s joint to read a bit about each of these guys.
Jabbo Smith
Hot Lips Page
Bubber Miley
I live Bubber, his work with the plunger mute was sensuous, nasty, monumental, and a real gas. Hear him talkin’ to ya’. No one else like it. No one.
Gotta love those monikers: Satchmo, Jabbo, Hot Lips, Bubber!
Henry ‘Red Allen’ Allen
This was an all-star band: Coleman Hawkins on saxophone, Rex Stewart on cornet (last to solo), Jo Jones on drums, Milt Hinton on bass, Pee Wee Russell on clarinet, Danny Barker and on banjo, Vic Dickenson on trombone.
Bix Beiderbecke
FWIW, Bix Beiderbecke is one of the most romanticized figures in jazz history, matched only by Charlie “Bird” Parker. Both men addicted themselves to death at a young age, Bird at 34, Bix at 28.
Frankie Newton
Bunny Berigan
I read about him before I ever heard him. Ray Anthony mentioned him in of the notes in a collection of transcribed Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong solos he’d put together.
Roy Eldridge
Roy Eldridge talking about playing the Paramount Theatre with Gene Krupa:
When the stage stopped and we started to play, I’d fall to pieces. The first three or four bars of my first solo, I’d shake like a leaf, and you could hear it. Then this light would surround me, and it would seem as if there wasn’t any band there, and I’d go right through and be all right. It was something I never understood.
From: Whitney Balliett. American Musicians: 56 Portraits in Jazz. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1986, p. 76.
Bonus: Frank Foster burns through it
I can’t resist. Frank was a tenor man, not a trumpeter. I studied improvisation with him when I was in graduate school (to study English). Here him burn through “After You’ve Gone” while fronting the Basie Orchestra in 1994 on his gold-plated tenor sax.
Ferocious!
Notice how styles have changed over the years, Eldrige in 1941, Foster in 1994. Eldrige was playing at the height of the swing era (actually, beginning to slide a bit by that time). The Basie band, was of course, swing band. And it remained so under Foster's care and guidance, more or less. It had too, because that's what the people wanted. Frustrated Frank a bit because, though he played with Basie in the 1950s, he came up as a bebopper, absorbed from Coletrane (you can hear it the virtuosity of his verticality) and even went a bit outside. Basie's band may have remained a swing band, but you couldn't have played that solo in, say, 1935 ("After You've Gone" was written in 1918).
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