What a coincidence, wow! I was eating lunch with my son and an elderly man joined us. It turns out that he was in the Army in the Philippines in 1941. When the Japanese took over the islands, he, with another 300 men, escaped into the jungles where they survived a couple of years until the islands were liberated.

Not only that, he saw the T-shirt I was wearing from the Umbria Jazz Festival and said he goes to the Elephant Room, an Austin jazz establishment, once a month to listen. If that wasn't enough, one of his high school buddies was Stan Getz! Who would've known. A walking piece of history.

Having worked and lived in most of the northern hemisphere, I've seen tons of "off-brand" horns. Amazing what can be done on many of them. Especially if you can't even get others (i.e. Yamahas. Bachs, Olds, etc.). Sometimes, what you don't know, won't hurt you.

. . . some people think I can be condescending . .
. (that means they think I talk down to people)

Everybody who wants to keep this, please copy and paste/save to your computer. Glad to help, just that I don't want to keep doing this. K'lani.

Cycle of Breath

1. The first step is a prepared body. If our chest cavity is "collapsed", we have to inflate it with force. That is pretty stupid. When we are sitting or standing up straight but relaxed (yoga is VERY good for this), all we have to do is inhale. We can get a huge amount of air without having to pressurize the lungs by force. Learning to prepare the body for playing is easy with beginners and increasingly difficult for players with more experience as they have to break habits to make new ones! It is important to have this activity monitored.

2. Once the body is big and relaxed, we draw a big circle. The left side (moving clockwise) is inhale and the right side is exhale. Notice at the top and bottom of the circle that it is still round - no disturbances. Our transition from inhale to exhale and exhale to inhale must mirror that. We do not hold air in, it is either moving in or out. We have to practice getting BIG breaths without building up tension in the throat or upper body. We use the diaphragm to inhale, but subconsciously. We don't need to think about how those muscles work, we just give them the big, relaxed body and they know what to do!
   We do not need to "push" our air out, we just exhale. Generally students have a BIG problem getting a big breath and then just exhaling. There is so much "learned" tension present that they need weeks to get this down.

3. Once our breathing works (in my lessons that means when I am satisfied - not when the student thinks that they are done), then we replace exhale with play. We do not tongue notes, we just switch to exhale and what happens, happens. The goal here is to develop the breathing apparatus and lips so that we are so relaxed that sound comes at the peak of the circle with no kickstart by the tongue. A couple of weeks of long tones this way shows us a lot about everything that we have been doing wrong. Notice how Rashawn in the youtube just exhales a triple C? Completely free of hard work! This is how it has to work in every register. Just exhale the note.

4. When I am happy with this stage, the student exhales into lip slurs - same principle - no tongue! Just exhale! Another couple weeks goes by to "perfect" this (it is never perfect) and we have made a considerable step forward. Our tone is no longer dependent on the tongue to reliably speak - regardless of how high or low, loud or soft. Generally with no tongue applied, we can lip slur a fifth to an octave more than we had before. The range caves when making music because we are still missing too much stuff.

5. At this point I have very specific things to learn to add the tongue. Critical here is that we do not use the sledgehammer tonguing that we needed when we were using pressure, we have to develop infinitely small "T", "D", "K", "G", "L", "R" attacks that are only used to "articulate" the beginning of the tone that occurs at the peak of the Circle of Breath. The tonguing must occur EXACTLY at the point where we switch from in- to exhale. If we tongue too early or late, we screw up the transition. This means we are back to long tones and trained ears and eyes to insure that old habits don't screw up what we have now carefully built. Once long tones work, we can tongue the initial intro into the lip slur. If our tone without attack was clean, the articulation is only frosting on top of the cake!

6. Following this, the student gets easy tunes like from the hymnbook and we work on proper breathing and articulation of real music.

This Circle of Breath is as far as I am concerned the biggest deal in trumpet playing. Without being able to do this, the rest can't ever click. It is as simple as inhale/exhale. The problem is understanding what we have done to ourselves: how sloppy we sit, stand, walk. How crappy our posture is, how caved in our upper body is, how tense our neck and shoulders are because we hang our heads, how brutal our tonguing is to kickstart a screwed embouchure that uses excessive pressure to enable playing at all. In addition we have a learned unwillingness to accept very small steps of improvement because we have learned to download cheats and believe the idiots that claim to have silver bullets for problems. We do not even notice the small improvements and therefore get frustrated that we haven't experienced the "miracle". I won't even get into lifestyle and attitude.

The human state is a product of what we repeatedly do. We need challenges and successes. We need the wisdoms to prepare ourselves adequately for the challenges any time that we can. That foundation can carry us a long way if it is solid.

I saw my lifes motto in a pub in Belfast a couple of years ago: Life is too short for cheap beer. We can add a lot of other things important to our wellbeing besides beer to this motto.

You never know what you'll get in N.O. Once, I was at the Jazz Fair going between two venues and there were scattered "second choice" bands on just cheap platforms or kiosks between the major acts.

As we approached one such band - they were playing a burning version of the Flintstones theme - I told the girl who was with me, "Hear these guys? I've got no idea who they are, but they're absolutely world class. The music world is so unpredictable you may never hear from them . . . but world class."

After they were finished, we were talking to them and they invited us to a 02:00 jam session. They were Branford and Wynton Marsalis.

I'm old school when it comes to the National Anthem. I see no reason to change it and, while musically one might want to modernise it, for me, the SSB exists in a time warp and should be played as close to the hip as possible. The military bands have, and play, the "authorized" version. I feel that gives it the kind of dignity and authenticity it deserves.

As an aside, many of the interpretations I hear at major sporting events make me want to puke.

Frankly, good valves mean to me that I am not distracted by their action while I'm playing; that nothing calls attention to them, that they cause no impediment.

I would like to say, though, that censorship should be aimed at vulgarity, name calling and other insulting comments and not just a difference of opinion. It's possible to disagree without being offensive.

Miles - So What
Harry James- You made Me Love You
Louis Armstrong - Hello Dolly
Ziggy Elman - I Can't Get Started
Bix Beiderbecke - I'm Coming Virgiia
Louis Prima - Sing, Sing, Sing
Chuck Mangione - Feel So Good
Herb Alpert - This Guy's In Love
Cat Anderson - El Gato
Clark Terry - Mumbles
Clifford Brown - Joy Spring
Chet Baker - My Funny Valentine

There keep cropping up assumptions about my background and I don't blame you for getting it confused. I hope no one thinks this is pretentious, because it's not. It's just that there are some things I know, but some things I have very little experience in, and they keep gettig mixed up. Knowledge of one thing doesn't imply knowledge of another. I wouldn't normally do this, but I think it might be helpful in avoiding any further confusion.

Training:
Secondary school: trumpet
College: BM on French horn, trumpet. MM on sax, flute.

Professional (sequential):
Service: French horn, trumpet
Free-lance composer/arranger
A.F. Band Commander
Self-employed sax and flute player, conductor, composer

Then: 2 major strokes, at least 3 minor strokes, unable to use left hand, so back to trumpet. And what a way back it has been.

Example of professional performance:
Royal Hawaiian Band, Air Force band, Tokyo Youth Philharmonic; French horn
Air Force band, soul band, big bands; trumpet
Big bands, county concert band, jazz and rock combos; saxes, flute
-most playing experience has been here

Conducting: the Arlington Symphony, USAF Band, D.C., Austin Civic Wind Ensemble, three German city bands, All-Sound Big Band (Germany)

BM: Composition major, Theory minor
MM: Composition major, Woodwind minor
DMA Conducting

Something very interesting in that film, and think it's lost on a lot of viewers, is that the director used a very subtle device. Some of the film is B&W and some in colour. It represents two different time frames, the B&W is the past, the colour is the present.

Like practically all biopics, that film takes poetic license. Yet, I believe, it's true in substance.

curlydoc, I'm a little late to the game but I'm so sorry for your falls and broken ribs. Must've been very painful and restricted.
I've just got two comments:
Continue to better health.
Long Tones.

Barliman - the pole dancer they were going to use got waylaid at the last minute. Otherwise, there would have been no complaints.

Well. somebody went to a lot of trouble putting that together, but I wonder - what criteria? No:
Carol King
James Taylor:
BS&T and Chicago
Barry Manilow (sorry)
Ray Charles
Aretha Franklin?

The list could go on.

Man, a little help up front would be nice.
Who'a the soprano?

Thank you, Shifty.

What description?

It would be nice if you gave credit to the composer and performers.

Look at a Monet and simultaneously listen to Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and you can intuit it.

Lester Young
Colman Hawkins
Charlie Parker
Dizzy Gillespie
Cecil Taylor
Ornette Coleman

Do we really need to go on?

Riffing off of George's comments about watercolors and pastels, this anecdote might interest the musician/painter at heart.

I was doing a watercolor abstract at the Honolulu Academy of Art and felt this presence over my shoulder. I finally looked up and it was my instructor, who asked, "Are you a musician?" I said yes and asked how he knew. "From the way you handled colors" he said.

I thought that was an interesting parallel. I was a budding composer of what you might call "abstract music".