One of my most technically advanced students was without doubt the least musical. I have also had the privilege of working with students who exhibited great musical sensitivity and were technically challenged. Wouldn’t it be great to be one of the gifted who has been able to combine both attributes? There are many who exhibit this gift and we, mere humans watch in envy at their ability. Enough with the poetic license, lets get to the good stuff. Great musical performances do not happen by accident. Every accomplished performer has spent decades striving for perfection in their art. What makes…

My first post in this series dealt with the contrasting characteristics of musicians wishing to learn to improvise jazz. The first example was the musician with the creative attitude for life and the second deals with the type of person who is more analytical. Learning to improvise jazz tends to fall in these two camps and if you are the type of person that enjoys plotting your trips with suitcases filled with maps, this is the post that might help you the most. Improvisation can be taught through exercises which develop repetitious phrases and rhythmic patterns which when placed in…

If you are the creative, spontaneous type of musician, you definitely have an advantage over the analytic or practical type of person. You are more able to create lines than the musician who is more characteristically able to re-create music from the page. I am not trying to convince you that there are no musicians who are able to do both (create and re-create music) for there are many. Wynton Marsalis and Allen Vizzutti are two very gifted trumpet players who are able to bridge the gap between the creative and the re-creative side of music. Unfortunately this honorable fraternity…

Why do we spend so much time and energy teaching the technical side of trumpet playing instead of the musical application of the trumpet? We, as musicians, write and lecture on every possible issue related to the technique of trumpet playing. Thousands of dollars are spent monthly on “the perfect mouthpiece”. Fortunes are spent annually in the search for the perfect trumpet. Unfortunately little attention is ever given to the real issue when striving to become a better  player. This one factor is more important to fine trumpet playing than anything else and that element is “sound”. You may refer…

Many performers pay close attention to the note values in the middle of the range, i.e. quarter, half, whole notes but when playing the other note values, we tend to get sloppy. The notes I am speaking of are the sixteenths and the whole notes. The problem with whole notes is usually because of laziness. “Who cares if the whole not has four complete beats? When I hit beat four, I stop playing”. Unfortunately a whole note is supposed to get four complete beats, not three and one-half. The other value which has been slighted is the sixteenth value. Just…