18 News - Historic Brass Society

Jimmy Owens, New School Jazz and Contemporary Music Program
Jazz artists have always understood what is needed to be considered
a great performing artist in the jazz tradition.The required elements
of the tradition had to be studied and learned allowing one to perform
with other musicians. What are some of these required elements?
How did those elements and study practices compare with other brass
idioms and traditions? My discussion will examine the professional
Jazz artists practice session and their routines. This workshop/paper
will identify:
1. Some of the musical techniques needed to perform in the Jazz
tradition.
2. The intuitive concepts the Jazz artist uses to learn.
3. The conscious and sub-conscious learning techniques used by Jazz
artists.
4. The building of instrumental skill level.
an epicene clown when he was not playing but assumed an unmistakably
masculine stance when he put the trumpet to his lips. Building
on a tradition that probably dates back to the African American brass
bands of the late nineteenth century, musicians such as Armstrong
found a way to express masculinity without arousing the hostility of
white supremacists.
Joe Wilder, NYC William Fielder, Rutgers University
genres
Round table: Brass history 1880-1940
This roundtable will consider avenues of research that may enlighten
and enrich brass instrument performance history in the period between
c.1880 and c.1940. This is one of the least investigated areas of brass
instrument history but it is a period in which idioms of brass playing
changed radically. Popular and art idioms became more clearly differentiated
in the minds and lives of performers yet they increasingly
converged in the creative imaginations of composers as diverse as
Ellington and Stravinsky and eventually Berio and others of the postavante-garde.
Three themes will provide a structure for discussion:
• What sources need to be investigated to cast light on these developments?
• What questions about this period should researchers (including
performers) be addressing?
Roundtable Paritcipants:
Trevor Herbert, Open University: Session Chair
Jeffrey Nussbaum, Historic Brass Society
Jimmy Owens (photo Ed Berger)
Jimmy Owens has over forty years of experience as a trumpeter,
composer, arranger, lecturer and music education consultant. Expertise
covers a wide range of international musical achievement which
includes extensive work as a studio musician, soloist, bandleader,
and composer of orchestral compositions, movie scores and ballets.
He has performed with Lionel Hampton, Slide Hampton, Charles
Mingus, Herbie Mann, Duke Ellington, Max Roach and Billy Taylor
among others
Krin Gabbard, Professor of Comparative Literature, State University
of New York, Stony Brook
Trumpet
Trumpets and cornets have long been associated with royalty and ceremony
if only because they could make so much noise. When African
nineteenth century, they could express themselves in a forceful, even
ex-slave who dared to strut his stuff in some other way would almost
surely have been lynched. But those black trumpet masters who made
the instrument their own, combining the ceremonial aspects of the
tradition with their own musical impulses, were applauded rather than
attacked. Later on, Louis Armstrong—and surely other black horn men
in the early years of the twentieth century—must have understood
this phenomenon. This would explain why Armstrong impersonated
has led to the early brass community embracing the investigation of
early jazz topics. An examination of the research methodologies and
and performers by seeing commonalities as well as differences in
approaches. This assessment could support and enliven research and
performance activities by making musicians aware of new avenues
of investigation that the “other side” has long accepted as a common
practice.
Bruce Raeburn, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University
The role of brass “marching” bands in the incipience and early development
of jazz in New Orleans remains one of the most fundamental
and elusive chronological questions in jazz historiography. Evident
band repertoire, then affecting dance bands and reorienting the local
music/dance market accordingly. In “The Nineteenth Century Origins
of Jazz” in Black Music Research Journal (Spring, 1994), however,
Lawrence Gushee concentrates on shifts in dancing fashion affecting
dance band repertoire and practices. This “chicken and the egg”
syndrome remains problematical, and historians interested in the use
of brass instruments in early New Orleans jazz must either choose
the demands of a “dance crazy” public cause brass instrumentalists
to adopt new practices and repertoires? More to the point, if “second
line” dancing was a factor in street processions during the incipience of
HISTORIC BRASS SOCIETY NEWSLETTER - WINTER 2005 | 13