News & Updates — trumpet

Happy birthday to one of the early influential jazz greats, Joe "King" Oliver! Old enough to claim Buddy Bolden as an influence, he became one of New Orleans' star cornet & trumpet players (he also had professional experience playing trombone). Despite having one working eye he learned to read and write music and was also a notable composer. He was mentor and a lifelong friend to Louie Armstrong, whom he taught and helped in New Orleans and later hired in Chicago. From about 1908 or so he was one of the best musicians in NOLA's Storyville district, destroying competitors in...

The original hippy, the mystical eden ahbez wrote a tune called "Nature Boy" and by chance was able to hand it to Nat King Cole who turned it into a mega-hit in 1948. He looked like a hippy long before it was a thing and lived outdoors in Los Angeles. He lived under the "L" of the Hollywood sign and held a job as a piano player in a raw foods store. He was a vegetarian, straight edge and an anti-vaxer and wore a white robe. This lifestyle inspired "Nature Boy", and after the hit by Cole, ahbez became an...

I want to give a shout-out to jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard on his date of birth. He may not have been an iconoclast himself but there he was on some of the most ground-breaking and important jazz records made in the '50s and '60s, such as Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz and John Coltrane's Ascension. You want more classics? How about this list of awesome LPs: Eric Dolphy Outward Bound, Max Roach Drums Unlimited, Wayne Shorter Speak No Evil, Oliver Nelson The Blues And The Abstract Truth, Art Blakey Ugetsu, Herbie Hancock Maiden Voyage, Tina Brooks True Blue, Sonny Rollins East Broadway...

Alfredo "Chocolate" Armenteros is my favorite of the great Cuban trumpeters. He had a powerhouse sound that could be brash and forceful, or sweet and lyrical. He got his professional start while still in Cuba, cutting his first sides in '49 with René Álvarez. The '50s saw him busy with Arsenio Rodriguez and Beny Moré. He also played with Nat King Cole on the pianists' Cuban sessions. He came to NYC in 1960 and got a lot of work doing sessions and playing in several bands. He played consistently with Eddie Palmieri from the late '60s through the '70s. In...

Happy birthday to the harmolodic genius Ornette Coleman! His saxophone crying and unique compositional style were as groundbreaking on the avant-garde jazz front as John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor & Sunny Murray, Sun Ra and Albert Ayler were in that new freedom era that started in the late '50s and caused an avalanche of free-jazz in the '60s. In fact, it was Coleman's "double-quartet" album, Free Jazz -from '60, which gave name to a whole genre to follow. The musical revolutionary grew up poor in Fort Worth TX and learned to sight-read and started teaching himself alto sax at 14, right...