Has Trumpet, Will Surprise

 

Has Trumpet, Will Surprise By BEN RATLIFF 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. Robert Caplin for The New York Times

The trumpeter John McNeil at Biscuit in Brooklyn, where he performs every Sunday, with Bill McHenry on tenor saxophone, Joe Martin on bass and R J Miller on drums.

The room was full and the music was bright, swinging and complicated. This is just one of Mr. McNeil’s 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, “Philosophy of the World,” 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. “This is the part of the show where the band plays the blues, and one of us talks over it,” he baritone-deadpanned toward the end of a set on Sunday. “I don’t 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. ...”

Five years ago Mr. McNeil, who is now 58, started making records for the small Omnitone label. There are three now — “This Way Out,” “Sleep Won’t Come” and “East Coast Cool” — and they have all been startling. Here was a mature composer and a first-rate player, pulling together jazz’s 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 “Wanwood,” from “East Coast Cool”: 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, “Look to the Sky,” 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 ’80s to the late ’90s.

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 “Thinking in Jazz,” 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 Mitchell’s dark, warm sound, and Lester Bowie’s imagination in free improvising.)

“Do I know what I can do?” he asked, rhetorically, in a recent conversation. “Yeah, of course. I can handle changes, I can play in all keys, I can write some good music. I just can’t say that.”

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 practicaland creative applications of harmonic theory.

HasTrumpet, Will Surprise

Published: February 15, 2007

(Page 2 of 2)

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 didn’t 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 ’50s Mr. McNeil saw Louis Armstrong on Milton Berle’s 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 couldn’t make his fingers do what he wanted. And whereas Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease rarely affects the muscles of the face, in Mr. McNeil’s case it did, as well as the tongue and the diaphragm. “So, basically, I have the big three for trumpet playing,” he said, laughing.

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

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 “Fortuity,” and Allan Chase, the saxophonist on the record, insists he still can’t 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 — “so they can see it’s no big deal,” he explained.

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