1/11/2024 0 Comments Shout it out trombone![]() This has been invaluable in a music that from its inception has been concerned with what the critic Albert Murray calls ''reciprocal voicing,'' the common phenomenon of ''singers playing with their voices as if performing on an instrument and of instrumentalists using their brasses, woodwinds, strings, keyboards and percussion as extensions of the human voice.'' More than anything, hearing jazz through the trombone would mean recognizing that the music is founded on ''vocal instrumentation'' - ways of playing that imitate and expand the voice's expressive capacities. Its relative limitations in terms of velocity and articulation are offset by great flexibility in pitch and timbre (since the trombonist hits notes by moving the slide, rather than with a valve or key). Just as Anthony Braxton and Steve Lacy started exploring solo concerts on the saxophone in the 1970's, Albert Mangelsdorff and George Lewis were elaborating startlingly innovative, polyphonic solo vocabularies on the trombone, defying naysayers who had dismissed the instrument as unwieldy and lumbering.Įven if its tonal qualities seem less salient than those of other instruments, the trombone has been crucial to the sound of jazz, particularly in the big band. In the 1920's, the trombone evolved as a soloing instrument in the hands of the New York musicians Jimmy Harrison and Miff Mole, and it contributed to the subsequent stylistic developments in the music, from be-bop (with Johnson and Frank Rosolino) to the avant-garde in the 1960's (with Rudd and Grachan Moncur III). In the early years of jazz in New Orleans, musicians like Edward (Kid) Ory (who led the best band in the city, featuring at various times Joe Oliver, Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet and a teenage Louis Armstrong) developed ''tailgate'' style, in which the trombone serves as a hinge between melody and rhythm, improvising a sort of ground bass behind the trumpet lead and clarinet obbligato. The multiple roles of the trombone emphasize the collaborative qualities of jazz, its shifting conversational fabric in which instruments offer not just individual statement but a variety of supporting interaction: foundation, embellishment, propulsion, provocation. ![]() Serving both ensemble and solo functions, it has proved more versatile than any instrument besides the piano. Still, the trombone provides a fascinating vantage point for the music because it is so indispensable (if overlooked) in jazz. This perception maintains its strength even though during the swing era, when jazz dominated American music, two of the most famous big bands were led by trombonists, Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey. Musicians sometimes joke about the ''types'' who are drawn to various instruments, and even for more flamboyant performers (Roswell Rudd, Frank Lacy, Craig Harris), there's some truth to the image of the trombonist as the paradigmatic second-tier horn man, content to remain out of the limelight. He was incapable of Dizzy Gillespie's voluble charisma, Charlie Parker's wrenching, vulnerable expressiveness, Miles Davis's edge and glamour or Thelonious Monk's alluring opacity. On his horn, Johnson was mercurial and astoundingly inventive, but by nature he was reserved, even austere. What would it mean, though, to view the music itself through the lens of another instrument? What qualities in the music would emerge? Would we value different elements in jazz if we heard it, to borrow a phrase from the novelist Ralph Ellison, on the lower frequencies?Ĭlearly, the visibility of certain instruments has something to do with personalities. A few historians, like Gunther Schuller and Gary Giddins, have offered overviews of the development of trombone style in jazz. The history of jazz has almost exclusively been a story of great men on a limited set of instruments: the trumpet, the saxophone, the piano. ![]() ![]() Johnson's departure was even more of a blow because it came so soon after the Ken Burns documentary ''Jazz,'' which did not even mention Johnson and largely neglected his chosen instrument, the trombone. Johnson, who took his own life in February after a long struggle with prostate cancer, was the devastating loss of one of the giants of postwar American music.
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