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Master Class
Jon Faddis
Jim Donaldson, reporter
Jon Faddis began his masterclass by focusing specifically on trumpet playing
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Jon Faddis |
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, and especially on the importance of listening. He also emphasized the need for jazz players to focus first on acquiring solid fundamental skills on the instrument, with the first fundamental being sound. He quickly moved on to discuss his interest in homeopathy, and in "treating the whole trumpet player."
He spoke about the need for dealing with extraneous emotional issues before one can progress as a player, and how anger, emotional imbalance, and personal pain can negate many of the positive aspects of one's playing and practicing. He cited the example of a young friend of his competing in one of the ITG trumpet competitions who was in the midst of a painful break-up with his girlfriend. Until he had some opportunity to reach some kind of emotional resolution, his playing would suffer. The young man himself then arrived at the class. Faddis used him to demonstrate a principal he called "muscles in balance," showing how difficult it was for the student to hold his arm perpendicular while still forming a useable embouchure. Solutions to such things, Faddis said, often came from counseling or from other
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Jon Faddis and Charles Porter |
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sources than trumpet pedagogy.
Returning to jazz fundamentals, he emphasized that the roots of jazz vocabulary were Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, and then played several Armstrong licks, challenging any of those in attendance to guess from which solo the licks were taken. Transcribing and understanding Louis Armstrong, and his sources ("Caruso, but not Carmine--Enrico!") and his innovations, creates the surest of foundations. Faddis played several Armstrong passages from the 30's which sounded very much like bop licks which would be common to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
He asked Charlie Porter of New York City to play an Armstrong passage or two, but chided him that his understanding of Armstrong was second hand: that it was Armstrong by way of Wynton Marsalis, not the original, and that it makes a significant difference. Faddis urged listening to all the classic Armstrong recordings.
About that time, just as Faddis was starting to hunt down those who had volunteered to play in the master class, we became aware that the room in which the class was scheduled had been committed to a rehearsal at 3:00,and we were being evicted. This barely slowed Faddis down, and the class moved out onto the lawn, and sat under a tree in front of the building.
During the next hour, Mr. Faddis had several students play, and he provided valuable insight into the ways that each could more easily reach his goals. With one, who ostensibly had questions about breathing, Faddis determined that his primary problem was one of posture, which was interfering with his breathing. He suggested that the student try to stand as if hanging from a hook attached to his spine, and to keep his air passage open by keeping his chin down (so that the oral cavity remained perpendicular to the throat) and back straight. With a couple of students he repeatedly emphasized the need to relax and eliminate tension in the neck, shoulders and back, specifically reminding the students to keep their shoulders down and in no way hunched up. He assisted one student with part of the introduction to the Arutunian Concerto, helping him push to the climax with more confidence and improved sound through greater air support and control of all the dynamic levels.
Another young man, in a moment of compelled intimacy, was challenged by Faddis about the conflict between his stated goals and his habits. Faddis was attempting, as he had discussed earlier in the session, to assist in resolving emotional difficulties prior to focusing on the exclusively trumpet playing issues.
After having coaxed several students to pull their horns out of their cases and play for the group, Faddis directed those remaining (as the class stretched into its third hour) to sit in a circle around the tree. He talked about the blues and their relation to jazz and the importance of learning to play "slow, fried chicken, low down and greasy greens, high cholesterol blues," several choruses of which Mr. Faddis played. At that point, he encouraged us all to get out our horns and we went around the circle playing a chorus, starting on concert B flat and moving up, taking four bar phrases, by generally a half step each trip around the circle. Our homework assignment was to write several slow blues lyrics appropriate to our individual life circumstances, including in his example, if it were true: "I got kicked out of prep school, 'cause my khakis weren't pressed...." We were then directed to provide music for the lyrics.
One could easily see the love Mr. Faddis has for the trumpet, the music, and for the younger students, and his desire to be of genuine help to them, all of which was amply displayed in the nearly three hours that he spent with us in this masterclass |
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