Concerto for Trumpet & Orchestra №1
A few years ago, I thought it would be cool to write a trumpet concerto for Wynton Marsalis as a present for his 60th birthday (on October 18, 2021). Then I sort of committed to doing that with the text message exchange in the screenshot above. Why did I feel obligated to do this?
When I was just starting to get serious about trumpet as a 13 year old, I asked my Grade 8 music teacher if anyone played both Jazz & Classical Music well on trumpet. It’s more common now than it was back then, but back then her answer was:
“Besides Wynton Marsalis, not really”.
This was also before the internet was easily accessible, so I couldn’t just look up that name when I got home from school that afternoon. But I remembered that name. A few months later another teacher mentioned that Wynton Marsalis would soon be playing a concert at Toronto’s Massey Hall. This was shortly after I started private lessons on trumpet, so I asked my trumpet teacher if I should go to the concert, and he highly recommended it, so another trumpet playing friend of mine and I went to that concert. Afterwards, we had the opportunity to go backstage and meet Mr. Marsalis. I remember being so shy and starstruck, that I couldn’t even look him in the eye when I shook his hand to ask him to sign my concert ticket and CDs. I was looking down and so he bent down to look up at me and wave “hello!”. He asked if I brought my horn, and I when I told him I hadn’t, he said:
”Man, you gotta bring your horn if you wanna be heard.”
A couple years passed and Mr. Marsalis was finally coming back to Toronto for another concert. This time, it was at the (then named) Ford Centre for the Performing Arts.
This time, I brought my horn.
It was also the night before I had a big solo feature at my high school’s December concert (we were playing the same arrangement of J.B. Arban’s Variations on “The Carnival of Venice” that Wynton Marsalis recorded with the Eastman Wind Ensemble). We used the upright piano in the greenroom backstage as my music stand. I got to the first fast variation, but it was sloppy, so Mr. Marsalis stopped me, and kindly told me to slow it down, clean it up, and work it back up to speed. I think I got home at 1am that night, but still woke up at 4:50am to get to school to practice early that morning.
A little less than two years after that, he was back in town, but with the large ensemble that’s now known as Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. They were touring, performing his Pulitzer Prize winning composition “Blood on the Fields”. I brought my horn again, and waited in line backstage to play for him again. This time, I’d prepared another J.B. Arban cornet solo (Fantasie Brilliante). There was no piano this time, so my music stand was…Wynton Marsalis holding my music.
I started playing, and after my attempt a couple years ago, I looked at him after each solo trumpet section to make sure he wanted me to keep going. I played the whole piece for him this time. What I remember most from that night was after the last variation, when I looked at him to make sure it all sounded ok, he looked at me, chuckled, shook his head, and said:
“Man, I ain’t never heard anyone triple tongue like that!”
I was simultaneously VERY relieved, very proud, and very happy. To this day, I think that’s still the proudest moment of my life, because that poor, skinny trumpet kid from Scarborough impressed his hero with hard work. I asked him if he had time for a lesson before he left town (they had another concert at the same venue the next night), and he told me to come back the next night and ask to enter at the backstage entrance. After that lesson, he gave me his number at the Lincoln Center offices to stay in touch. Every time I went to a concert of his in New York, he always remembered me and made time to chat after the show. When I’d grown up a poor kid from Toronto with no musical family, minimal encouragement from that family, no real access to world-class music educational resources growing up, a horrible first two years at school in NYC because of an awful trumpet teacher, and years of people ignoring or dismissing my music, knowing that my childhood hero thought of me as a trumpet player with potential has always been my psychological safety net of reassurance. So, that’s why I felt obligated to write this concerto for trumpet and orchestra in three movements:
I. Allegro Maestoso
I first learned about Sonata Allegro form on the PBS special “Marsalis on Music”, and since Wynton Marsalis’ big breakthrough as a classical soloist was winning a concerto competition in New Orleans with Franz Joseph Haydn’s trumpet concerto, I knew I wanted this first movement to be in a modified Sonata Allegro form. But I needed melodic themes for the exposition, so I thought about where I might find them.
Years ago, someone gave me an LP that featured some recordings from Wynton Marsalis’ earliest jazz recordings on Columbia Records along with an interview of his. He was telling the story of his first jam in NYC session with Art Blakey, when Blakey called a tune that Marsalis didn’t know the chord changes to. So, Marsalis had to try to play by ear (with the alto player telling him the changes…in the alto sax key instead of the trumpet key).
I decided this first movement should start off sounding like a cross between that tune from the jam session and the first movement of Haydn’s trumpet concerto. That would represent the young Wynton Marsalis who moved to NYC to attend Juilliard and try to break into the NYC Jazz scene. (Like the Haydn, the second theme is less prominent, and introduced without an obvious key change). I wanted the development section to sound like a musician finding their way in a new home. In that development section, the solo trumpet part’s first phrase (the triple tongued passage) is in perfect 5ths with the string section to allude to that alto player calling out the chord changes to in E-flat instead of B-flat. There’s call and response in that development section until the solo trumpet and orchestra eventually figure out how to work together to create more concurrent counterpoint. The cadenza…well, if you’ve heard the Wynton Marsalis recordings of the Haydn trumpet concerto, I think you’ll recognize the beginning of this cadenza.
II. Adagio
I wanted this to sound like an orchestral arrangement of an old folk song, but I didn’t want to use an existing folk song because that felt like a cop out. So, I knew I had to write a new poem and set it to an original (but singable) melody to create that effect. But I also wanted this to be meaningful to the purpose of this composition, so that’s when I was stumped and moved on to writing the third movement for a couple weeks. As I was composing the third movement, I remembered Mr. Marsalis heartfelt Facebook post to mourn his father’s passing last year. I wondered if there was a way for those words to serve as a foundation for something musical. Eventually I was able to write a poem based on that Facebook post. During that process, I realised that as he honoured the memory of his late father in his grief, Mr. Marsalis also honoured his father’s legacy as teacher and musician by reminding all of us that grief can be something that brings people together through finding common ground. His original words also served as reminder of how we can grieve while celebrating and honouring the lives of loved ones lost. I tried to make this movement something that started somber, and then grew into something that sounded more like a celebration of life. (On a more musical/technical note, it’s also a bit of a rest for the trumpet soloist, because of the third movement…)
III. Presto
On top of all his achievements as an instrumentalist and a composer, Wynton Marsalis’ work as an educator has made the world a better place for a lot of people. For my ears, there are two musical forms that convey the concept of teaching: Fugue & Rondo form. Remembering the Haydn concerto again (and the Hummel), I thought Rondo would be most appropriate for this 3rd and final movement. The larger form of this movement is A-B-A, with the larger A sections being in Rondo form, and the B section being a halftime orchestral interlude based on the 12-bar blues form. The A subsections of the Rondo form are based on the chord progression of John Coltrane’s “Countdown”. The other subsections of the Rondo form are based on chord progressions of up-tempo tunes that Mr. Marsalis has recorded/performed often (“Cherokee”, songs based on the chord progression to Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm”, “Donna Lee”). I also used a couple of his improvised phrases on “Cherokee” from his album “Standard Time Volume 1” in some of the orchestral accompaniment parts. The halftime blues interlude serves as a rest for the trumpet soloist because of the ending of this movement. I don’t presume to know how to teach an orchestra of classical musicians how to swing with notes printed on a page, so for this movement, I was trying to evoke that sound of mid-20th century European composers who tried to write “jazz influenced” music. This concerto was composed as a gift to Mr. Marsalis, but I want it to be something other classical trained trumpet players can play. The tempo (160 bpm to the half note) and snare drum throughout turns this into a march where the even the eighth notes in the solo trumpet part give it the sound of a march + up-tempo swing hybrid.
I think I was a little too young to grow up watching him do this in live performance often, but I’ve seen the videos and heard all of the stories about how he would play entire improvised solos circular breathing throughout. I wrote those two pages of consecutive eighth notes as an homage to those demonstrations of virtuosity of his early career, but in the context of this concerto, with the orchestra playing the thematic material introduced by the solo trumpet in the opening bars, it is a juxtaposition of the younger Wynton Marsalis into the legacy of today’s Wynton Marsalis who has inspired generations of musicians around the world, and then by extension, future generations of trumpet players who might perform this composition that was also inspired by his contributions to music. My hope is that if he learns and performs this, playing those last two pages with the circular breathing will evoke a little nostalgia for him. I wanted this final movement to tie the past, present and future together.
I obviously don’t have the resources to hire an orchestra to record this, so the recording that’s available now on Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, etc is a MIDI (computer generated) orchestra backing me playing the solo trumpet part. Who knows, maybe some orchestra will want to premiere this in a live performance and pay Mr. Marsalis a lot of money to perform the solo trumpet part. #justsayin
