petals

Awesome! I just found once-lost transcription of an interview I did with musician Carol Morgan for a project I did a couple years ago- the topic, Jazz History and it’s influence or something along those lines. She is a wealth of knowledge.
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Sarah M. Williams interviewing Carol Morgan
Saturday March 30th, 2002
University of Houston- Downtown

SW: For the sake of the interview, would you please state your occupation as well as any credentials you might have.

CM: Okay, well, my name is Carol Morgan, and I am… I like to be though of mostly as a jazz trumpet player, but I am also an educator. I teach at San Jacinto College, its north and central campus- trumpet and jazz improv. I studied classical music and jazz in college at the University of Texas and later at Juilliard.

SW: For starters, what attracted you to jazz in the first place?

CM: Well, I’d always kind of listen to, uh… how my family was, we’d always listen to different music than what was necessarily popular- kind of my dad’s influence I think; and I guess in the ’70s it was a category of music we listened to- kind of “instrumental” it was called. I don’t even know if they have that anymore. But it was kind of like Henry Mancini movie music or, you know, various kind of light, kind of, uh… but not rock, so much. But anyway, we listened to a lot of classical music so it opened me up to listening to a different kind of music and that was key, I think, in when I first, I guess, really started paying attention to jazz was about my senior year in high school when I went to a national music camp in Interlochen, Michigan. And well, my dad, who was gracious enough to pay the expensive fare to get there said, “Hey, why don’t you take this jazz class.” So I was like “okay”. And it was fascinating. I loved, uh… particularly on Fridays we had this jazz history day and he would tell stories of all the great jazz players… I was fascinated by it immediately, and it was… you know, it was really fun to play. I had played piano, I had been somewhat interested in ragtime music before that, so it was kind of like, right out of that, it was like, even better to me- I wasn’t limited to playing on piano, I could play my trumpet, which I enjoyed playing more, so… that was kind of cool.

SW: So what made you decide that that was what you wanted to do?

CM: Well, um, it took me a long time to figure that out, actually. I knew I wanted to play trumpet- and I can’t explain that other than I just always thought that was what I was going to do; that I don’t even remember making a conscious decision, it was just like, I can’t do anything else, really. So even by the time I was deciding on graduate school I was working on classical music and jazz, so I, uh, auditioned for North Texas University- a premiere jazz school- and at Juilliard in New York- which was a premiere classical school. And I thought, well, you know we’ll see what happens; but I hadn’t made a decision as to which I really wanted to pursue. And then I got into Juilliard and was so excited about the prospect of going to New York and all, that I went and I just pretty much decided to be a classical trumpet player at that point and, uh, and I was miserable. I was playing everything on C trumpet-