petals

started listening to him and kind of got into that idea of playing by ear and I started playing along a lot with records. So I think I developed a lot of… kind of the way I… when I am focused on just listening to how I am playing, while it is going on, I think it shows a lot of Chet Baker influence in the kind of timing of things. There’s kind of similar spacing… and, uh… and that’s just not assuming. I know, after I had been playing along with Chet Baker records for a couple years, I went and did a… I was playing on a CD in Los Angeles for Seabreeze records- a big band album- and there were some players that hadn’t heard me in several years. And although I was playing music that was very unlike Chet Baker, I got through with the solo, and the guy who was leading the session said “Reminds me a lot of Chet Baker, you know, not harmonically but…” and I was like “excellent, that’s good”. So Chet Baker was a big influence. And then, in more recent years, I’ve kind of gotten into Freddie Hubbard, and I’ve always liked Louis Armstrong, even from before I played trumpet, you know, that sort of sound I liked, so he’s always been kind of motivational. Another player that I really enjoy that’s a little bit obscure is uh… oh, I can’t remember his name, but I can see his picture, uh… well he’s a New York cornet player that’s kind of an old school player. And he does things like, uh, shake on notes and stuff like that that’s really kind of out of style, but yet, I always kind of thought it was cool and I find myself doing it in more modern harmonic versions. But doing those kinds of shakes and everything… that was kind of surprising… I played for Jim Rotundi, who’s a New York trumpet player, like last summer, and he noticed that, he was like, “that’s kind of interesting, you know maybe I’ll try that.” And uh… I’m still at a loss to think of the guy’s name… Oh, Warren Varshay (SP?). And then, checking out tenor players I think have been, recently, more influential than trumpet players. And especially like Wayne Shorter and John Coltrane. But you know, I’d like to think they are influential, but they are really pretty over my head and they’re people I’m trying to study. And then, kind of modern trumpet players that I enjoy- Tom Harol, Tim Hagans, Dave Douglas- but see, I’ve left out an important figure, and that’s Miles Davis, and he kind of like goes through the whole thing. My roommate and I were living in New York; we had moved together in Manhattan for about five years, and we were kind of whacked, as most people in New York are. We would do this, uh… well, it was actually… I went to Juilliard… Miles Davis was a Juilliard student himself in the… I would guess early ‘50s, probably like late ‘40s. So he set up a scholarship fund, when he became very successful, at Juilliard; and I actually went to Juilliard on one of his scholarships, and I thought that was kind of cool. The first semester I was there was when he died- it was in the fall of ’91, and he died around the age of, oh, 60, early 60s. It was kind of, uh, it was really strange in New York- he was a huge figure there, you know, even to just normal people who didn’t listen to the music. A radio station there, an FM jazz station, they played Miles Davis recordings for like, I want to say, sixty four straight hours. That’s all they played- Miles Davis. And there was enough- he recorded that much that there was that many hours of his music that they didn’t have to repeat anything. Miles is the, to me, the beautiful thing about Miles is his innovation. You know, it was not just that you could listen to