In this episode, Chris Gekker emphasizes the importance of mastering the ability to play softly on the trumpet, which is often overlooked. We also discuss how the perception that jazz negatively impacts classical musicianship has changed over time, reflecting evolving attitudes in music education.

The act of improvisation, once dismissed, is now recognized as a crucial skill for all musicians, including classical players. Chris' contributions to trumpet pedagogy stem from his personal challenges and experiences, leading him to publish method books.

Links referenced in this episode:

jamesdnewcomb.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

1. Philadelphia Orchestra
2. Eugene Ormandy
3. New York Brass Quintet
4. Library of Congress
5. Watergate
6. Maynard Ferguson
7. Doc Severinsen
8. Rafael Mendez
9. Wynton Marsalis
10. Juilliard School
11. Eastman School of Music
12. Charles Colin Publications
13. Bobby Hackett
14. Duke Ellington

Every person I ask on this podcast, I want to hear their story, their history, and I want to know what got you interested in the trumpet.

First, like you're a kid, you get into it.

What got you started on it?

I went to public school.

I was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Alexandria, Virginia.

And in the fourth grade in the public school, they would bring the instruments around and show them to everybody.

We knew that day was coming.

And as a little boy, for some

reason, I liked to say the word clarinet.

For some reason, that word was fun to say.

But then we all went to a concert, and pretty much all I could hear were the trumpets.

So that decided me,

and I took to it quickly.

I had great band directors in Alexandria.

A couple, Jack Dallinger and Roy Smith were wonderful trumpet players themselves.

And then also living in a D.C.

area, I grew up listening to military bands.

The Watergate in those days was actually a floating barge on the Potomac river where the bands would play.

And we were there all the time.

My father.

My parents were European, my father Russian, my mother German.

And they were music lovers.

And my father would take me to concerts.

The Philadelphia Orchestra with Eugene Ormandy coming to Constitution Hall.

When I was in eighth grade, he took me to a New York Brass quintet concert at the Library of Congress.

And that, literally, I walked out of that a different person.

I had never heard a trumpet sound like that.

It changed everything for me.

It was a little bit like if you see the wizard of Oz, when Dorothy walks through the.

Oh, yeah.

Black and white of the color.

Yeah.

Alan Dean, who was on stage that night, who's still a great friend of mine, and I talk to him now and then, and yeah, it's.

What were they playing?

Well, it was a brass quintet recital.

They played serious brass quintet literature.

So anyway, in high school, I was also an athlete.

I was a varsity athlete in several

sports, and so there was always that tension.

But I practiced the trumpet hard and I got a lot of experience.

I played the Hummel Concerto with the Navy Band in Constitution Hall.

I did a lot of things and

then also was getting involved with jazz a lot.

And I played in what we used

to call soul bands.

I guess you might call them funk bands now.

We played James Brown and Wilson Pickett.

And I got used to playing in groups that.

Where people didn't read music.

So that became an early thing that I got comfortable with, and that has stood me in good stead to this day.

I love that imagery of Dorothy seeing the Emerald City or waking up after that, that tornado and everything's in color.

And then I just remember when I was a kid watching it, it's all in black and white and then everything is in full color.

And what.

What colors?

Such a beautiful scene and such a beautiful imagery to describe.

Chris walking into that recital where he, you know, he doesn't know what to expect, but he walks out a changed man and he changed young man and he realizes this is how I'm.

This is.

I'm going to devote my life to this.

Speaking of the trumpet, the trumpet often has had, well, has earned a reputation for being brash, a little bit arrogant from its players, the greats, Maynard Ferguson, Doc Severinsson, Rafael Mendez, Winton Marsalis.

They're all household names, more or less.

And they've given the trumpet a reputation of being loud and ambitious and brash.

And it is.

It's also very difficult to play softly.

And as we're going to hear Chris describe, it's actually easier to play higher and faster.

It's just the physics of the instrument.

When you get into the lower register and you are not playing with as much volume, it's much more difficult.

Chris equates it to a plane landing versus taking off.

I'll let him describe it, but I want to share with you sometimes that it's.

It's the things that we don't notice that are the most important elements of our lives.

In the case of the trumpet, of course, the high notes and the loud is impressive and it's wonderful, but it's really those moments where you have to play soft and where your, your job depends on, on you playing just, just that thing that maybe nobody will notice.

But it is, it's very important.

The composer put it in there for a reason and it is important.

So let's hear Chris Grecker talk about this.

From my earliest days, I had a

feeling of the way a trumpet played, sounded when it played softly.

So as a high school student, I

would like to rummaged through the local public library, the LPs all the time.

And one was Mahler Third Symphony with

the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein conducting.

And the third Movement.

There's this gorgeous offstage solo sounding from a distance of a post horn.

And it's was Johnny Ware who later, yes, yes, became a good friend of mine.

I recorded with Bernstein, Mahler second, and Johnny and I were standing next to each other playing off stage.

Anyway, I play that over and over again.

That is an iconic record.

It's been a big part of a lot of trumpet players background.

I heard Gerard Schwartz.

Unbelievable.

Just trumpet, bassoon and harpsichord.

So delicate, so nuanced.

I literally wore that record out.

I had to buy a second copy.

And not just, but also in jazz, like Bobby Hackett, the soft cornet, kind of beautiful.

Ray Nance, who played with Duke Ellington.

And I just play that over and over again.

So, yes, I love.

Believe me, I heard Doc and all that kind of stuff and it's still thrilling.

But I just had a special kind

of inside feeling for the way a trumpet sounds.

Sounds when it's played softly.

So anyway, no, I think that's very interesting that.

Because the trumpet is always has this stigma of being the loud.

Like you said, you went to that first concert and all you could hear was the trumpet.

So you said, I'm going to play that.

But I think in my experience and from the people that I've spoken to, the real ability if you can't master it unless you can play soft.

Yeah.

I have friends who are pilots, for instance, and they tell me that the most difficult skill as a pilot is to fly a plane slowly.

The plane is at its least efficient when it's slow.

The trumpets too.

If you're a strong trumpet player, if

you crescendo into the high register, the trumpet actually increases in efficiency.

It gets more compressed and it just becomes a sort of streamlined, very efficient instrument.

Descending, it's losing compression and it's losing stability.

You never have a rough takeoff in an airplane generally, but the landings are often quite rough.

And as if someone goes to flight school, they spend a lot more time learning how to land on things.

When you're saying descending, you're talking about

the volume or the volume and tessitura.

If you're decrescendoing into low register, your trumpet is losing more and more efficiency.

So to control it is a great art.

So with students, when they're practicing going

at a low register, they should play nice and full.

That keeps their efficiency a little bit more manageable.

But they're eventually going to have to play very soft.

And there have been several instances where

in major orchestras, trumpet players were let go because they had difficulty playing low and soft.

Beethoven Violin Concerto has a second trumpet part which is just playing low.

Concert A's below the staff, but for something like 17 or 18 measures, just tonguing very softly.

It's very exposed.

And there's an old saying in the major orchestra field.

It's like one of those sayings which is not completely true, but it has a lot of meaning.

They say you win your job playing big and you keep your job playing small.

And it's often the slow, soft, low stuff that is the most dangerous.

The name Chris Gecker is pretty well known in the world of trumpet.

Even if people don't know Chris Gecker as the wonderful trumpet player, then they know his name by the many, many method books that he has written and published.

And I often wonder what makes a person write a method book.

There's so many.

Why?

Why, when there are so many to choose from already, would someone write a method.

Method book?

And so I asked Chris, what in the.

Why did you write these method books?

The short answer.

And he'll explain in just a moment in more detail.

But the short answer is that he just had issues with his math.

Maybe his mental.

The mental aspect of playing trumpet.

The physical aspect of playing trumpet, really.

He had problems with his playing, as every trumpet player has, as every person who does anything.

We all have problems with things.

And so he wrote these.

Well, he had these own exercises that he would just practice so that he could kind of solve these problems or at least minimize the problems.

You never quite solve those problems, do you?

But he had so many of these that he just decided, why not just publish it?

And he got with a publisher and the rest is history.

So here we are.

So now we're going to hear from Chris describing the process of creating and publishing these wonderful method books for which he is known in the trumpet niche.

I never have ever set out to write a book.

In the early 80s, I'm running around

New York playing everywhere, and I always had a lot of my own exercises.

When I was in high school, I

was not able to take a weekly private lesson.

So I took some very meaningful lessons,

but they were not regular.

And I got in the habit of writing a lot of my own exercises that I would think of a problem.

I'd say, what if I hit a

high note loud, then all of a

sudden have to play a low note soft?

And then I'd say, okay, now I'm going to make that into an exercise.

So I had piles of my own exercises.

So in New York, I was like running around, and I was teaching.

When I first got to New York,

my first college teaching job was out at Brooklyn College.

And I was, you know, 27 at

the time, so I.

All these exercises.

So Mark Gould, dear friend of mine, he's principal trumpet of the Met and

should be known by every trumpeter.

And he had seen these, and he called up Charles Colin, head of Charles

Colin Publications, and said, you should print these.

So I get a call from them and said, we'd like to print these exercises.

So I said, fine.

And to be honest, my first thought was, gee, now I won't have to

go to Kinko's anymore.

They're going to make all my copies for me.

And that book is now close to 40 years old.

It was called Articulation Studies, and It included some A2s and some duets.

And then there's.

There's been a series of them since then, but in each case.

And just last year, one came out

called Focal Point Exercises, which I'm getting a lot of feedback from trumpeters also overseas on.

And I can talk about that a little bit.

But in no case did I ever sit down.

I'm going to write a book.

It was just like, I'm just spinning out these exercises.

And now Dr. Charles Colon is sadly gone.

Now.

I'll always be very grateful for him

because I was, like, unknown and he

was so nice to me.

And you remember people who are nice

to you when you don't have anything necessarily offer them back.

You know, I wrote it during a time when I was getting ready to do a bunch of solo recitals, and

that's been circulated widely and.

But they're all written for me when I still practice them.

When I play these etudes, I'm getting

the physical and musical feedback I need.

It's like a mirror you hold to yourself.

And I, believe me, I often fall short.

But that's the process of practicing scene and.

And trying to improve.

The last clip that I want to play for you is very, very interesting.

Chris went to the Juilliard School, which is in Manhattan, you've probably heard of it.

He ended up transferring from Juilliard to the Eastman School of Music, which is not as well known.

It's in Rochester, New York.

Maybe it's not as well known because it's not in New York City.

Doesn't have all of the glamour and all of the.

The lights.

Juliard is just better known.

They just didn't have it.

In fact, they had signs in the hallways as you're going to hear Chris describe saying no jazz is allowed.

They have a great jazz program, a lot of great jazz musicians.

The great Miles Davis, you may not have known, actually went to Juilliard for a short period of time.

So all that to say is that although the.

The Juilliard School has since changed course and they've changed their policies, back in the day, they didn't allow jazz.

Why would they not allow jazz?

There are many theories as to why this would be.

The most likely theory that I can think of, and I think Chris agreed with this, is that if you listen to jazz or if you play jazz, it's going to kind of corrupt your mind.

If you're focused on becoming a great, you know, virtuoso classical musician.

If you're going to play jazz, it's going to corrupt this.

This endeavor of yours.

So they may not have had anything against jazz per se, but maybe it was just a means of just, you know, if you're going to be focused on being a classical musician, then you can't play jazz.

So they.

They literally had signs saying, don't play jazz.

And if those who did play jazz, they would face disciplinary actions.

That's not the case anymore, but that was the case.

And it's just an interesting case study as to how our biases affect our perception of reality.

And sometimes how those biases we, you know, we think that we're going to be corrupted or we think that something is going to have some effect on us when really that's just our imagination or maybe our own biases or our own inherited worldview informing how we think that something like jazz is going to affect our mentality when it comes to playing classical.

If anything, jazz is going to make you a great.

It's going to make you a better classical musician.

As I've heard many classical musicians say, studying jazz has made them better at it.

So problem has been fixed.

Chorus has been corrected.

Jazz is now allowed at Juilliard, but it wasn't always the case.

Let's hear Chris Gecker talk more about this, and then we will close off with.

With some finishing thoughts.

Speaking of jazz, and I'm glad that we circled back to this topic because I want to ask about that policy at Juilliard.

Why is it that they would have, in your opinion, from your perspective, why would they have that policy or just that stigma?

Why did that exist there?

It existed all over.

That jazz somehow would harm someone who was studying Mozart or Haydn or Beethoven.

And it's just a mistake and it's been corrected.

Julia now has extremely strong commitment to jazz.

And every school that has included jazz in a strong way has benefited in every way.

Anything we talk about can be done

for good or for bad.

But if a good jazz program is put into place, it benefits everybody and it's also ill educated.

Mozart, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, these were great improvisers.

The art of improvising is firmly in our culture.

It was only in the early 20th century that musicians started getting this kind of worshiping the literate score.

Franz Liszt used to, in his solo recitals, he would be playing Chopin's B Minor Sonata.

And in the slow movement he would just take off for 10 minutes and then come back.

And that was celebrated in those days.

But then there was like a shift of opinion.

And in the early 20th century, among some very powerful musicians, they consider that

excess and that they considered that was doing something bad to music.

And possibly it could have been.

They could have been right.

Like most things, it's probably reaction, counter

reaction, and when we swinging back and forth, we lose a lot of the balance.

But the truth is that great musicians

improvise and should be able to create without necessarily having to look at a sheet of paper.

And that doesn't mean just jazz anyway.

James.

I think the answer was it was a prevailing opinion that jazz would somehow.

I had a teacher in high school who, when he found out I was listening to Miles Davis records, stopped talking to me.

That was just a prevailing attitude that was around.

His attitude, well, you now you're gonna start playing out of tune.

Your tone is bad.

It's not out of tune.

And Miles Davis had one of the most distinctively colorful expressive tones in the history of music.

But yet this was an attitude a

lot of people had.

So it would damage your perception of real music or how would it be damaging?

Yeah.

You just said that sentence in such a way was like, how could anyone believe this?

But what you said is literally what was said.

Yes.

Wow.

So if you listen to jazz, it's going to affect your ability to play Mozart, who was in.

If ever there was a composer who wrote in the flow, it was him.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's same was said about a lot

of things parents would say before that if you listen to Ellis Presley, you're going to turn into a delinquent.

If you listen to Beatles, you're going to, you listen to Bob Dylan, you're going to become a pothead, whatever this was.

So this stuff was said all the time.

Well, that will do it for this episode.

Featuring highlights from my interview that I did with Chris Gecker, professor of trumpet at the University of Maryland, well known publisher and author of trumpet method books.

Great guy and well versed in how music can inform a meaningful life, not form, inform a meaningful life.

There's going to be a lot more content that is going to be coming your way here on the podcast.

I've done some really, really great interviews over the years and I'm looking forward sharing them in a format similar to this.

So stay tuned if you like this.

I'd love to hear from you.

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