All About Jazz Music, Musicians, Bands & Albums

Catch a show over dinner or drinks, at the most intimate music venue in downtown Portsmouth, now outfitted with a brand new sound system and third-floor views of the stage. Grab a table, or hit the dance floor—we’ve got your favorite local and national touring acts taking the stage almost every night of the week. It’s the people that keep coming back, to share a drink or take the stage. It’s the community of musicians and artists, performers and listeners, who’ve made this the place we Jazz know and love.

How to Read Trumpet Music

Kenny Clarke, the first of the great modern drummers, moved the timekeeping role from the bass drum to the ride cymbal, and used the kick and snare drums for accent and rhythmic stimulus. Pianist Thelonious Monk, whose playing style was more spare and idiosyncratic, initially had a greater impact through his angular compositions, which to this day remain the jazz works most widely performed after those of Duke Ellington. The music that eventually became jazz evolved out of a wide-ranging, gradually assimilated mixture of Black and white folk musics and popular styles, with roots in both West Africa and Europe. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called “pop fusion” or “smooth jazz” became successful, garnering significant radio airplay in “quiet storm” time slots at radio stations in urban markets across the U.S.

In terms of cost, it often lies within the mid-range of trumpet prices, meaning it’s usually accessible to aspiring musicians. Legendary virtuosos like Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis have graced the stage with the Bb trumpet, showcasing its remarkable versatility. What sets its tone apart is its distinctive blend of brightness and articulation, spanning classical music, jazz, and pop. With all history, the further back you go, the foggier the specifics get, but it’s believed that the metal trumpet dates back to 2000 BC in Egypt. This will have been a natural trumpet, with sounds made using harmonics.

NBA Rumors: Jazz Need ‘Major Package’ to Trade Walker Kessler

That is a really great approach for a player who is strong and smart but maybe not the most athletic. One of the top names in big-band jazz, Basie pioneered the hard-driving sound of Kansas City swing and later brought it to a global audience. What started out as “sort of a graduation photo or class picture of all the jazz musicians,” as Kane once put it, became perhaps the most emblematic and enduring image from the genre’s golden age.

Morton’s solos, however, were still close to ragtime, and were not merely improvisations over chord changes as in later jazz, but his use of the blues was of equal importance. Any attempt to arrive at a precise, all-encompassing definition of jazz is probably futile. Early attempts to define jazz as a music whose chief characteristic was improvisation, for example, turned out to be too restrictive and largely untrue, since composition, arrangement, and ensemble have also been essential components of jazz for most of its history. Similarly, syncopation and swing, often considered essential and unique to jazz, are in fact lacking in much authentic jazz, whether of the 1920s or of later decades. Again, the long-held notion that swing could not occur without syncopation was roundly disproved when trumpeters Louis Armstrong and Bunny Berigan (among others) frequently generated enormous swing while playing repeated, unsyncopated quarter notes. After recording with the quartet over the next few months, Coltrane invited Pharoah Sanders to join the band in September 1965.

As a beginner, you’ll be pressing down valves and learning proper holding technique. So I advise buying a new student-model trumpet since used horns may not play as easily. Trumpets that are pitched in the low G key, called sopranos, or soprano bugles, are in fact adaptations of traditional military bugles and are most often used in drum and bugle corps, though soprano bugles feature both rotary valves and also piston valves. Due to the fact that this trumpet uses far less tubing than the others, it’s pitch is a lot higher when compared to the more conventional trumpets.