With video clips proliferating on the internet, you never know what you’ll run across. Roaming around YouTube, I happened on one called Trumpet Summit ’04. The lead-in box showed a still frame of Jon Faddis. Something clicked. When I punched up the clip, sure enough, it was part of the Vienne, France, twentieth anniversary festival that I covered, not in 2004, but in 2000. YouTube’s accuracy of information is at the mercy of its contributors. The piece is “Honeysuckle Rose.” To hear and see it, click here. Below is my account of the entire concert, as it ran in a long report in the February, 2001, issue of Gene Lees JazzLetter.
The night’s theme was Louis Armstrong. The Trumpet Summit Band had the formidable rhythm section of Cedar Walton on piano, Doug Weiss on bass and Idris Muhammad on drums supporting trumpeters Terell Stafford, Randy Brecker, Lou Soloff, Roy Hargrove, Terence Blanchard and Jon Faddis. Backstage, as they milled around getting ready to go on, Brecker told me, “We don’t know what the hell we’re doing.” They figured it out on the first number, “Indiana”. The solos were brief, at the most a couple of choruses apiece, encouraging self-editing. Stafford began with a straightforward bebop solo. Brecker dug into the chords. Hargrove did a nice adaptation of Dizzy Gillespie and observed Clifford Brown’s rule of contrasting phrases. Soloff quoted Armstrong’s “West End Blues” introduction. Faddis and Stafford sidled up close on opposite sides and stared at him. Soloff ignored them. Blanchard played cleanly, high, and without the slurs and half-valve notes that so often dominate his improvising. Muted, Faddis combined traces of Gillespie and Sweets Edison and reduced the others to head shaking and laughter with his impossibly high and humorous playing. Walton played the first of his eight perfect solos in the set. Everyone avoided the temptation to quote “Donna Lee.”
Faddis and Stafford shared “Blueberry Hill”, Faddis muted and growling, Stafford using a plunger and making rich harmonic choices. On “Sunny Side of the Street,” Soloff showed the mature wisdom of using pauses as notes. Brecker went deep inside the changes and found material to make a beautiful new melody.
Hargrove’s tone, phrasing, sense of harmonic changes and control of time on “Sleepy Time Down South” combined in a solo that brought sustained applause from the audience and his colleagues. Later, he told me, “Man, that’s a hell of a way to learn a tune.” He said he had never before played it. Blanchard used his slurs and half-valve effects in Sleepy Time and worked them into a climax worthy of Roy Eldridge. Everyone played on Honeysuckle Rose. The big surprise was Stafford, with his aggressive and imaginative use of swing and bop elements. He has recorded with Tim Warfield, Stephen Scott, Bobby Watson, the Clayton Brothers, and others, but he was new to most of this audience and they let him know that they were impressed.
Soloff and Faddis played the “West End Blues” intro in unison, leading into a long, slow blues. Iraklì de Davrichewy materialized onstage for the first solo, unintimidated by this high powered company, and did well. So did they all, but Brecker is one of the few trumpeters alive who seems to have truly heard what Fats Navarro discovered about changes. His solo proved it. Faddis roamed around in the altissimosphere, then dropped down into the range of mere high Cs for some pure Louis. Walton incorporated “After Hours” without making it a corny trick.
The encore was “Get Happy,” played fast. Not until near its end, in a series of four-bar, two-bar and one-bar exchanges did the ad hoc gathering deteriorate into the messy jam session it might have been in lesser hands.
I hope that more videos from the 2000 Vienne festival turn up. It was a remarkable festival.