[Dixielandjazz] The Unknowns of Jazz

[Steve Barbone]

CAVEAT - NOT OKOM - HOWEVER, a neat story about a virtually unknown trumpet
player who is a bit of a legend in NYC. He was originally inspired by Louis
Armstrong and has overcome a great deal of adversity in his life including a
Doctor's advice "not to pursue a career as a musician". How many more like
him are scattered around the world?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Has Trumpet, Will Surprise

NY TIMES - By BEN RATLIFF - February 15, 2007

The same night that some rather questionable choices were under
consideration in the jazz categories at the Grammy Awards, there was the
trumpeter John McNeil, one of the best improvisers working in jazz,
performing in the small back room of Biscuit, a barbecue restaurant in Park
Slope, Brooklyn. Mr. McNeil plays at Biscuit every Sunday, leading a band
with the tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry.

The room was full and the music was bright, swinging and complicated. This
is just one of Mr. McNeil¹s recent bands, and its repertory is a clutch of
tough little pieces from the 1950s by Russ Freeman, Gerry Mulligan, Dizzy
Gillespie, Wilbur Harden and others. After a year the gig has become one of
the best regular jazz events in the city.

Mr. McNeil is a kind of trickster figure. How else to explain his newest
group, My Band Foot Foot? Its mandate is to play arrangements of songs by
the Shaggs, the trio of desperately untalented New Hampshire sisters who
made a single album in 1969, ³Philosophy of the World,² a milestone of pop
folk-art. The band will play its first performance this Saturday at the
Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village.

Medium size, stocky, white-haired, with large, hooded eyes hidden by
glasses, he seems armored, moving stiffly and wearing fingerless gloves
onstage in the winter. Ritually he warms up his fingering hand with the
flame from a candle. But when he plays, nothing is occluded: he delivers
high-level improvisations at fairly quiet volume with astonishing harmonic
acuity and a uniquely liquid, even sound.

Between songs come gallows-humor microphone breaks. ³This is the part of the
show where the band plays the blues, and one of us talks over it,² he
baritone-deadpanned toward the end of a set on Sunday. ³I don¹t talk very
well over this kind of happy, major-key blues, though. Maybe I could do it
over a blues in E. It would have to slow down. And I could tell you about my
childhood. Which was really painful. Any- way. ...²

Five years ago Mr. McNeil, who is now 58, started making records for the
small Omnitone label. There are three now ‹ ³This Way Out,² ³Sleep Won¹t
Come² and ³East Coast Cool² ‹ and they have all been startling. Here was a
mature composer and a first-rate player, pulling together jazz¹s postwar
strands: bebop language to the letter, tricky-meter tunes, free jazz,
20th-century classical harmony. (Listen to a solo like the poised, singing
one he plays on ³Wanwood,² from ³East Coast Cool²: moving all around the
horn, it keeps offering fresh harmonic choices as it moves among chords.)

The records were playful too, full of wicked personality, like Mr. McNeil
himself. 

But who is he? You might still have to ask musicians to know. He came to New
York in 1974 and quickly developed a high reputation among musicians, first
as a sideman with Horace Silver and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis big band, later
as a bandleader himself. (A 1979 album he made with the trumpeter Tom
Harrell, ³Look to the Sky,² became a favorite among trumpet players.) Then,
by public traces, not much. He made a string of records ‹ some of them
perfunctory by his own admission ‹ on the Danish label Steeplechase, and he
performed rarely from the late ¹80s to the late ¹90s.

One reason for his obscurity was a constitutional resistance to
self-promotion. When asked to construct a thorough genealogy of jazz trumpet
players up to 1993 for the landmark jazz-studies book ³Thinking in Jazz,² by
Paul Berliner, he omitted himself. (Were he in it, he might be shown as
coming out of Thad Jones and Freddie Hubbard, with a little of Blue
Mitchell¹s dark, warm sound, and Lester Bowie¹s imagination in free
improvising.) 

³Do I know what I can do?² he asked, rhetorically, in a recent conversation.
³Yeah, of course. I can handle changes, I can play in all keys, I can write
some good music. I just can¹t say that.²

Another was day work. He started teaching occasional clinics at the New
England Conservatory in Boston, then took over a music theory class there in
1989, which he has continued, teaching two days a week. Hundreds of his
students are scattered around the jazz scene, including Mr. McHenry and Dave
Douglas. Mr. McNeil is regarded as a master not only of trumpet technique
but also of the practical and creative applications of harmonic theory.

But the big reason was Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a neural disorder that
affects the nerves and, by extension, the muscles in the extremities of the
body. The illness is hereditary: his father had it, though the signs didn¹t
show until he was in his 70s. Growing up in Yreka (pronounced why-REE-kuh),
Calif., near the Oregon border, Mr. McNeil dealt with it from childhood,
wearing braces from his legs to his neck from the ages of 7 through 16, when
a series of operations relieved him of the braces.

In the late ¹50s Mr. McNeil saw Louis Armstrong on Milton Berle¹s show.
Inspired, he taught himself how to play trumpet and read music, but burdened
himself with poor technique; at the University of Portland in Oregon, a
teacher straightened him out. It was not the last time he would be starting
from scratch.

Starting around 1982 there were days when he couldn¹t make his fingers do
what he wanted. And whereas Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease rarely affects the
muscles of the face, in Mr. McNeil¹s case it did, as well as the tongue and
the diaphragm. ³So, basically, I have the big three for trumpet playing,² he
said, laughing. 

One of those bad days was captured on an album, ³The Things We Did Last
Summer.² It spooked Mr. McNeil, and though he kept touring, he decided not
to record again for a while. ³Then I just stopped everything,² he said. ³The
irregularity was maddening. I began to think I didn¹t have any talent. It
does strange things to your confidence. You don¹t have to fail absolutely to
have no confidence: you just have to fail every so often.²

>From 1983 to 1996 he made no more records; he concentrated on technique. (He
also underwent surgery to have his spine reconstructed.) He learned what he
now had to do to execute his ideas: he needed to be amplified and to develop
a method of correctly balancing the muscles in his face to maintain
sufficient compression.

In 1997 he discovered he could not extend the fingers in his right hand,
which he uses for fingering his instrument. During two years he bought
himself a left-handed trumpet, learned how to finger with his left hand and
made a record left-handed. (It was called ³Fortuity,² and Allan Chase, the
saxophonist on the record, insists he still can¹t tell the difference.)
Finally he regained the use of his right hand, went back to his normal
playing practice and started his midlife renewal, forming one band after
another and making music on his own terms.

Mr. McNeil has never defined himself by the illness. (During his high school
years he had diagnostic tests at the Mayo Clinic, and was told that he
should not pursue a career as a musician. He still feels he is avenging that
advice.) He has largely hidden it from the public, though now he says it
might be useful for people to know about it ‹ ³so they can see it¹s no big
deal,² he explained.

Recently he was fitted for some handsome new custom-made finger braces that
allow him to curve his fingers better. ³And they¹re sterling silver,² he
said, showing them off between sets. ³So I have a little bit of a pimp thing
going on.²