News & Updates — trumpet

Happy birthday to the great trumpet and flugelhorn player of bop and beyond, Art Farmer! A player of precise control and elegant brightness, he had a long and distinguished career that was creatively giving til the end. He grew up in Phoenix and tried out several instruments: piano, violin, tuba and cornet before settling on trumpet as a teenager. He started making his name on the Los Angeles scene of the '40s, working with his bassist twin brother Addison Farmer, Sonny Criss, Jay McShann, Roy Porter, Johnny Otis, Benny Carter, Gerald Wilson, Big Joe Turner, etc. In the early '50s...

Happy birthday to the great Satchmo, Louis Armstrong, the amazing New Orleans jazz trumpeter who's 1920's bands stand among the most important groups in the history of American music. I know he always said he was born on the 4th of July, but we are giving him the birthday nod on his true date of birth, today. So smoke a reefer and listen to the sound bend around.

One of the leading lights of the hard bop era, trumpeter Lee Morgan broke onto the scene as a teen prodigy, playing with John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Hank Mobley and Art Blakey in the mid-to-late '50s. His driving style and clear, bold tone contributed all over the hard bop landscape, from funky to bluesy, and from more adventurous modal stuff to delicate standards. Throughout his short but steadily working career he played with Wayne Shorter, Elvin Jones, Charlie Persip, Grachan Moncur III, Andrew Hill, Benny Golson, Jackie McLean, Larry Young, Curtis Fuller, Jimmy Smith (The Sermon), Bobbi Humphrey and in...

Best known as the older brother of saxophonist Wayne, Alan Shorter was a fiercely unique free jazz trumpeter and flugelhorn player in the '60s and early '70s. From Newark NJ, he was playing in a bebop group as a youngster with Wayne, Grachan Moncur III and Walter Davis Jr. He spent some time in the Army and joined the fire music scene, cutting sessions with Archie Shepp, Alan Silva, Marion Brown, Francois Tusques, the Full Moon Ensemble and his brother's 1965 album The All-Seeing Eye. (In fact, he was composer of "Mephistopheles" on said album). He made two underground classics...

Happy birthday to that bitter bastard genius, the incomparable Miles Davis!! From bebop to cool jazz to modal to out-funk/fusion to pop, Miles played it all and never cared what the critics thought of him! My personal favorite era was his '70s hard-avant-funk, some of which sounds so brutal that it borders on proto-death metal!