Reprints from the to promote communications among trumpet players around the world and to improve the artistic level of performance, teaching, and literature associated with the trumpet International Trumpet Guild® Journal The International Trumpet Guild ® (ITG) is the copyright owner of all data contained in this file. ITG gives the individual end-user the right to: •Download and retain an electronic copy of this file on a single workstation that you own •Transmit an unaltered copy of this file to any single individual end-user, so long as no fee, whether direct or indirect is charged •Print a single copy of pages of this file •Quote fair use passages of this file in not-for-profit research papers as long as the ITGJ, date, and page number are cited as the source. The International Trumpet Guild® prohibits the following without prior writ ten permission: •Duplication or distribution of this file, the data contained herein, or printed copies made from this file for profit or for a charge, whether direct or indirect •Transmission of this file or the data contained herein to more than one individual end-user •Distribution of this file or the data contained herein in any form to more than one end user (as in the form of a chain letter) •Printing or distribution of more than a single copy of the pages of this file •Alteration of this file or the data contained herein •Placement of this file on any web site, server, or any other database or device that allows for the accessing or copying of this file or the data contained herein by any third party, including such a device intended to be used wholly within an institution. http://www.trumpetguild.org Please retain this cover sheet with printed document. J OHN M C N EIL : O VERCOMING BY T HOMAS E RDMANN January 2021 • Page 24Erdmann: How did you come to be a sub in the Thad Jones/ Mel Lewis Orchestra? McNeil: I met Thad at a jam session somewhere—maybe Wichita. Some guys from Kansas City who had played with Count Basie were there. They were playing at a rib joint, and I went down to sit in at the jam session. When I noticed Thad, it was a moment of “I do believe that’s Thad Jones.” I asked if I could sit in, and everything was cool. He liked the way I played and asked, at the end of the night, what I was doing. I said, “I think I’ll go to New York in the fall.” He said, “Bring your horn on Monday night. You can sit in.” That was an easy audition I did- n’t know was going on. Erdmann: This points out how we always have to play our best because we don’t know who’s listening to us. McNeil: You sure don’t. I remember some of us from New York were close to Louisville for something or other, and May- nard Ferguson’s band was playing in a high school auditorium in Henryville, Indiana. We weren’t playing that night, so we got a car and went to see Maynard. You could tell the guys in Maynard’s band were disdainful about playing there. In their solos they would play cartoon music, sneering and smiling at the same time; it was very unbecoming. I was thinking how those guys should be embarrassed to play that way. The only guy who didn’t do that was Maynard. He played like he was playing for the king. It was shocking how disrespectful the other guys were. I said, “If they only knew who was in the audience, namely us—and we were sitting right in front—they wouldn’t play that way.” I was thinking about how it could have been me up there being a freaking idiot. It was a great lesson. Erdmann: You advocate left-hand practicing in your Trumpet Techniques book. During one of the flare-ups of CMT, you had to play the trumpet exclusively with your left hand for two years. To aid this you had two left-handed trumpets made by Kanstul, which you used on Fortuity, playing the entire album left-handed. You play so perfectly on that album; no one can tell you were play- ing left-handed. J OHN M C N EIL : O VERCOMING BY T HOMAS E RDMANN FA4 24 ITG Journal / January 2021 © 2021 International Trumpet Guild T he list of trumpeters who can play both “in” and “out” with ease, as well as with melodic and har- monic inventiveness and excitement, is incredibly small. Perhaps the master of this technique is trumpeter John McNeil. He is now fifty years into a storied, landmark career and commands respect for his lightning-quick improvisa- tional reflexes and subtle soloistic nuances. Critical acclaim is universal. The Chicago Tribune writes, “(McNeil’s) refusal to fall back on prefabricated hip licks was another sign of his commitment to emotional truth.” The Washington Post says that McNeil plays with “a balance of understatement and uninhibited swinging.” Famed critic Ben Ratliff noted in The New York Times, regarding McNeil’s wide range of improvi- sational acumen, “(McNeil) delivers high-level improvisa- tions… with astonishing harmonic acuity and a uniquely liq- uid, even sound… pulling together jazz’s postwar strands: bebop language to the letter, tricky-meter tunes, free jazz, (and) th century classical harmony.” Born in Yreka, California, in , McNeil taught himself to play the trumpet and read music. Playing professionally immediately upon graduating from high school, after a stint at the University of Portland (Oregon), he moved to New York City via Miami and Louisville in . McNeil become a fixture in Greenwich Village’s underground scene, in time garnering gigs with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra and Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band, among others. McNeil’s career was launched when he beat out ten of New York City’s finest jazz trumpeters to win the trumpet chair in Horace Sil- ver’s quintet. It wasn’t long before McNeil also became known for his ability to compose and arrange music, as well as produce recordings for others. Today he leads his own bands and co- leads a quartet, Hush Point. McNeil later took up teaching when his life-long struggle with the neurological disease Charcot-Marie-Tooth (cmt), a form of muscular dystrophy, disabled him for a time. Teach- ing at the New England Conservatory (nec) one-and-a-half days a week, he became one of the nation’s most acclaimed and successful trumpet and music teachers; his list of success- ful students is truly remarkable. In pursuit of helping others, McNeil is the author of two trumpet tutorials and co-author of a third with Laurie Frink. Their book, Flexus, is described by trumpeter Ray Vega as “the most important trumpet method book of the new millennium.” Vega goes on to state, “It stands with Arban, Clarke, Schlossberg, Stamp, and Caru- so as standard material for any serious student of the trum- pet.” McNeil’s first book, Jazz Trumpet Techniques (), basically his practice routine at the time, helps trumpeters develop articulation and fast fingers. The subsequent The Art of Jazz Trumpet () goes further. He also edited a collec- tion of guitarist John Abercrombie’s compositions, Time- less—The Music of John Abercrombie (). While Aber- crombie selected the tunes, McNeil’s annotations provide insightful commentary drawn from his own interviews with the guitarist. While cmt does not define him, it is amazing how McNeil has persevered. Not generally fatal, cmt is a progressive dis- ease marked by a loss of muscle tissue and touch sensitivity, which flares in waves. It has invaded his facial muscles, diaphragm, and fingers—everything needed to play the trumpet. It has made it more difficult to walk and caused him to have back surgery that reduced his height by one-and- a-half inches. High doses of Human Growth Hormone (hgh) have helped him tremendously. That McNeil has not let it slow him down is perhaps the greatest testament to a lifelong love of jazz, the trumpet, and musical excellence. “That was an easy audition I didn’t know was going on.”© 2021 International Trumpet Guild January 2021 / ITG Journal 25 McNeil: It was serendipitous to advocate left-handed play- ing before I had to do it to make a living. Kanstul made a cou- ple of left-handed trumpets for me at that time. I am a relent- less keeper of practice logs and diaries, and after , hours of left-handed practicing, I was able to play a gig. After another hours of left-handed practice, I recorded Fortuity. Erdmann: I bought the Trumpet Techniques book shortly after it came out and started doing left-handed practicing myself, especially on hard licks, and found it really worked when I went back to doing those licks with the right hand. For you, what was the key to being so fluent left- handed? McNeil: My aim was to make it a secret I was playing left-handed. Now, more peo- ple will know. The key was having faith in the ideo-kinet- ics. Luigi Bonpensiere, in his book New Pathways to Piano Technique, talks about the ideo-kinetics where one hand learns to do things the other hand has learned to do. Even though the other hand had never practiced them, it can kind of do them anyway. When you practice left-handed, as opposed to right-handed, it forces your mind to redefine the problems and make new grooves to accommodate them. Then, when you switch back to the other hand, there is a moment of electricity, and all of a sudden, you have mastered whatever was previously difficult. The feeling when you switch back and can all of a sudden play so much better is wonderful. This technique can cut so much time off your practice. I had done it a bunch before I had to, so I could already play trumpet left-handed a little bit—not great, but okay. Erdmann: Did the left-handed trumpets help? McNeil: Yes. The thing you don’t think about is trying to play a right-handed trumpet left-handed. That’s almost impos- sible, because the valve slides and saddles on those slides are set at the wrong angle. The balance, also, is all off. When I got that first left-handed trumpet in the mail and sat down to play it, I almost fell off the chair, because it threw me off so much. For about two or three minutes, I truly didn’t know what to do, but then it clicked in. It was an amazing time that had a certain amount of serenity to it, because I knew I was going to have to play chromatic scales and Clarke studies for x amount of time left-handed. I wasn’t going to have to worry about anything else—just doing those things. I had to work on the coordination of my left fingers and aligning it with my articulation, every- thing—all of the hard fingerings and stuff. Things you don’t initially think about. To help me, I also played Hanon on piano with the left-hand. I tried to learn to write with my left hand; anything I did right-handed, I now did left-handed, such as punch numbers into a phone. I did as many things left- handed as I could in order to make it a part of my life. It worked. I even renamed my regular band “Lefty.” “When you practice left-handed, as opposed to right-handed, it forces your mind to redefine the problems and make new grooves to accommodate them.” Following page: Photo credit: Eldon Phillips Photo credit: Andrew Hurlbut© 2021 International Trumpet Guild January 2021 / ITG Journal 27 Erdmann: When you were young, you taught yourself not only to play the trumpet, but also to read music—and this before the YouTube era. Do you think you have had lasting advantages as a musician be - cause you have such strong self- discipline? McNeil: I do. Part of it stems from combating neuro- muscular disease. Because of it, you can’t gain anything very fast, and you can’t do it all in one day. You have to be willing to say, “I’m going to do this every day, and I’m going to keep at it until I’m able to do the action I want to do.” Doc- tors were very little help. Early on they told me, when I was and first diagnosed, that I should not consider being a professional musician because I would never achieve the motor skills it takes to be a professional. At the same time, they also told me not to lift weights, which I had already learned helped me a great deal. So, I took both of those pieces of advice under advisement. The doctor who told me I would never be a musician was named Dr. Dick, and I thought that was an appropriate name. After I recorded my first album, I sent him a copy, with no note attached. Erdmann: You took thirteen years off, from 1983 to 1996, from doing recordings due to health concerns. Sonny Rollins told me that when he took off 1959 – 1962 from recording as a leader because he wanted to work out some things with his playing, when he returned to recording as a leader, it was with a renewed energy. Did you experience any kind of a different mindset when you went back to the studio as a leader after that time off? McNeil: I was like a spring that had been held down. The disease had been gradually beating me up, and I found ways around it. Because of the muscle-wasting part of the disease, I had my front bottom teeth built up, so they took up a little more space, allow- ing me to get the trumpet up a lit- tle higher and put more pressure on my lower lip. I also learned to play with my lips completely curled in. This way, of the vibrating surface was in the air stream. Everyone I talked to during this time told me I had to be as efficient as I could be. Part of the problem was that even at that time, I had a restricted air supply from the disease. The amount of compression I could create was also limited. Facts are facts, so I did what I could. I found if I could become more efficient, I could make better use of the air I did have. I also found I could play some high notes, but if I did that, I would get tired really quick and have to take a break. That hardly works. I tend to not go up that high unless it’s the end of a session; then I’ll try to get up there a little bit. On the East Coast Cool recording, I did go up to a high D or E (on Bernie’s Tune and Deadline) and hung up there. Erdmann: To help this, you play a Vega trumpet? McNeil: A good friend of mine, Brad Goode, was visiting here in New York, and I told him I was having trouble finding a horn that was easier to play, taking into account my air situ- ation. I have to do it all myself, because the horns never seem to help me. He had me try one of his, and I instantly overblew it. He told me to just breathe into it. When I did, the sound was incredible. It’s a small-bore horn that is over years old. I asked if he could play lead on it, and he said, “Sure, listen.” Then he started screaming on it. It doesn’t take air to get a big sound on the horn, and you can still play dark, bright, or whatever you want. He told me he had three, and he sent me one as a gift. When it came, it had an apparatus that allowed it to be turned into an A trumpet using slides and levers. Back when it was made, there were a lot of concert bands going around the country, and some of the trumpet parts were in A. Josh Lan- dress made some adjustments to make it play in tune a little better, and it plays great. It is in great shape and much easier to play than any horn I have ever had. Except for the tendency to overblow it, it’s great; it projects more and plays better in every way. I would have never thought you could play a small bore and have it work this well. All of the small bores I played in the past were terrible, and I could never get them to speak. This one does. Erdmann: There is a great video on YouTube of you demon- strating jazz improvisation concepts on the P. Mauriat PMT-700 trumpet, employing fourths, major and minor thirds, lip trills, “The doctor who told me I would never be a musician… After I rec - orded my first album, I sent him a copy—with no note attached.” Trombone student Tyler Bonilla (left) having a lesson in John McNeil’s studio. McNeil travels from Brooklyn to Boston once a week to teach at NEC. Photo credit: Andrew Hurlbut28 ITG Journal / January 2021 © 2021 International Trumpet Guild© 2021 International Trumpet Guild January 2021 / ITG Journal 2930 ITG Journal / January 2021 © 2021 International Trumpet Guild and then a Charlie Parker-inspired variant using doodle tonguing (la-da). You handle all of this exceptionally difficult music perfectly, making it look and sound so effortless. One immediately knows you not only practiced hard when you were young, but obviously still take practicing seriously. What does a practice session of yours look like these days? McNeil: I start with breathing exercises, the first of which is not prescribed by anyone. I hold my breath for maybe sec- onds. I do it calmly and relax. I work it up to to seconds, but it’s better if I can work it up to to seconds. I don’t stop doing these until I get it up to at least seconds. When I get it up to forty or so seconds, when I need the next breath, it’s like coming up from under water where you gulp in a lot of air. Doing these exercises makes everything else easy. Then I start in the middle of the horn with a few notes and buzz those same notes with just my lips. I also make sure I tongue when I buzz. I do five or ten minutes of that. Then I play some basic Caruso exercises. After that, I’m ready to play. Then I just do the normal practicing most people do. I make sure I work on doodle tonguing every day and do all of my hard combina- tions, such as mixed slurring with doodle tonguing. I also do fast lip trills, followed immediately by fast doodle-tonguing patterns; those are really hard. I use a timer to make sure I cover everything I need to. For me, the sleep process takes all of my trumpet abilities away, so I have to almost start from scratch every day. Erdmann: You do some piano work as well, correct? McNeil: Every day I do the Hanon studies. I get up, put on my finger braces, and sit at the piano. It’s like I’ve never played the piano before; it’s the most amazing uncoordinated thing you have ever heard. I start by playing slow, subdividing the lines, and use a metronome. Then I speed it up a little. My playing is full of clams, but I don’t stop when I make a mistake. It sounds like atonal Hanon, playing all of the notes that shouldn’t be played. After about five to ten minutes—never less than five and never more than ten—something happens, and I feel like I can play the piano again. I asked a doctor why this happens, and he said, “What you have is a situation where maybe this finger is moving about percent of normal in terms of the electricity being con- ducted through it, this finger here is going percent, the one next to it is going at percent, and this other one is actually getting as high as percent. But this finger is sad and only going at percent. When you send a message to those fingers, they don’t all get it at the same time, which is why you think you’re going to play something, but something else happens. They aren’t going when you want them to, and your subconscious has to get it all sorted out.” He’s right, I don’t think about it, but at some point, all of the fingers start to work in the same way, just like the day before and the day before that. It’s amazing. The mind is a great com- puter sorting everything out. Every day the situation is slightly different, and every day my mind has to go back and correct everything all over again until all of my fingers are on the same page. I watch it happen every day. I don’t get angry; I just say, “C’mon fellas, let’s do it,” and pretty soon, I—and they—can. Erdmann: To me, your book written with Laurie Frink, Flexus, is the next step in the evolution of the Cichowicz Flow Studies, melded with Charles Colin’s Lip Flexibilities, integrating some ideas from Fay Hanson’s trumpet tutorial along with Caruso’s trumpet ideas, and all of it fleshed out with a lot of original ideas presented in a wonderful, developmentally progressive setting. It is “For me, the sleep process takes all of my trumpet abili- ties away, so I have to almost start from scratch every day.”© 2021 International Trumpet Guild January 2021 / ITG Journal 31 a fantastic book and not for the faint of heart. I read where you said it’s a book for improvisers. Could you explain that? McNeil: I told Laurie I was playing the horn pretty good, but, “When I solo, I play well at the beginning, and while I’m not really tired after a few choruses, I play badly at the end. My embouchure kind of falls apart, even though I keep my corners tight.” She said that wasn’t the problem. She said, “As an improviser, you’re playing at the extremes of what you can do. These are unrehearsed actions, never having played that music in that way before. You can play a written solo and two or three choruses and be fine at the end if you practice it. So, it’s not that.” I even checked her out by playing a Clifford Brown solo, and I wasn’t tired at the end. She said, “When you have unre- hearsed movements, you have a tendency to make tiny errors. As you go along, the errors compound until you’re finally play- ing just a little wrong, then a lot wrong. They add up as you go along. Most trum- pet players who have problems experience this.” She was right. I remember Dizzy Reece always sounded good for a couple of choruses, and as he went longer, his range and his accuracy gradually reduced. He had to know when to quit early. You either learn how to beat this problem, or you’re known as someone who only plays briefly. I asked her if she ever developed exercises to beat this. She had, but she hadn’t done anything with them. I said we should do a book together. I would be her guinea pig, and she could be mine; we would go back and forth to find what has to be in the book. You can’t practice the surprising aspects of an improvised solo, but you can practice things that you may be asked to do in a solo. Erdmann: The whole book is great, including the etudes. McNeil: Thank you. You’ll never be asked to do stranger things in a solo than what we have in this book. Of course, Marcel Bitsch has other strange things as well. That was how the book started. We include the Carmine Caruso things, because they tend to help the most people. Carmine’s thing was all about timing, subdivision, and pounding that into you. Timing can get off in a solo, because you’re playing things that are unrehearsed. He always said, “The body coordinates itself better if it has a consistent time frame to operate in.” Time and again that has been proven correct. The book also includes some strange flexibilities. I once saw something in a Kopprasch trumpet book where you go from third space C to G above the staff with no valves. Erdmann: Lip bending? McNeil: Yes. So, we included that, as well as things like play- ing in the key of E but using the key of F fingering so you have to lip everything down. That’s a killer. We also put in some flexibilities, followed quickly by tongued wide intervals— things that are unexpected. Then other things in the book are “meat and potatoes,” like long tones and all that business. That was the aim. We would spread the pages of the book out on the floor and walk back and forth looking at what we had. Doing this allowed us to see if a section had too few pages, which would make us go back and flesh that technique out. It was a big undertaking. Erdmann: When I interviewed Freddie Hubbard, who, like you, could also play both “in” and “out” with equal ease, he said, “Playing ‘in’ or ‘out’ doesn’t matter, but what is important is how you resolve.” He credited the thoughts of George Russell in helping him get “outside” the chord. The example he used was playing an E-flat seven chord over an A minor flat-5 chord, superimposing chords in that way. How did you come to develop your abilities to play “out” so well? McNeil: Resolution is the key—how you get there and how you get back. A listener hears wrong notes—mistakes—after they happen, not while they happen. If you play a phrase with notes that don’t fit, they will sound like they fit if you resolve correctly at the end of the phrase. If you do this, the listener will say, “That was great.” If, however, you clam on the resolu- tion or make it clumsy, immediately in the mind of the listener everything will be classified as a mistake. To learn how to play in this manner correctly, I would hold an F major chord on the piano and then, at the same time, start on my G on the trumpet (which is concert F) and try to hear and play, ascending, G, A-flat, D-flat, G-flat, and end up on the G an octave above where I started. You can also do this in a descending pattern. I would play these “out” notes in between the notes that sound traditional. I would want to be able to hear leaving the F major chord and then going back. That’s how I learned to do it. I also try to be graceful when doing it. I learned to not be afraid to do this. Additionally, I would use Jamey Aebersold records, which are great for singing and things like this. They’re not as good for playing, because they are not live and are unable to be responsive to you; but they do pound out every chord all the time. That’s ideal if you are singing, because you want to hit everything. If you want to learn to play “out,” you have to learn to hear distance. I worked on going along playing on tunes that are very diatonic, in F or G, and would try to hear distance from those chords. For example, if I play in A while F or G is being played on the record, you learn F-sharp is more distant because it’s a half-step away. I would also practice these con- cepts descending. I wanted to be able to hear this distance clearly. This can be hard to do if there are a set of changes going on. It’s much easier to learn this with static harmony, because it’s a fixed target. Or, you can do it successfully on tunes with changes if the changes are diatonic and have a sense of a single pitch to them. Erdmann: Can you give an example? McNeil: Rhythm changes in B-flat are relentlessly in B-flat. You can play a B-flat all the time over those changes, and while that pitch won’t necessarily always fit all that well, it will be okay. In that regard, rhythm changes are like a modal tune. Trumpet: small-bore Vega made in the teens, with a Coast ½c mouthpiece that is not at all close to the standard size of a Bach ½c. It is closer to a Bach c and was made in West Germany before . E QUIPMENT “The body coordinates itself better if it has a consistent time frame to operate in.” “If you play a phrase with notes that don’t fit, they will sound like they fit if you resolve cor- rectly at the end of the phrase.”Next >