Earl Gardner

I was playing in the house band at a night club in Cherry Hill, NJ called “The Latin Casino.”  Bill Pusey was the lead player. Every week there was a different act from Sinatra to Gladys Knight, Vic Damone, Cyd Charisse.   I really learned about what lead playing was about from him on that gig. 

            Conrad Gozzo who played with Sinatra was an influence sound-wise, and Snooky [Young] for phrasing.  They’re kind of similar; real big, bright but fat, not edgy.  They had real brilliant sounds like a sizzle but a fat sound.  It had some body and weight to it. Of course, Maynard [Ferguson] had everything.   He had a great sound and he could do it all.

            Al Porcino taught me how to play lead with Thad and Mel.  Originally I was playing third and he was playing lead when I joined the [Thad Jones/Mel Lewis] band.    They told me I was going to be playing lead and I didn’t know why.  Thad called me into the dressing room and said, “When we get back to New York you’ll move over and play lead.”  Turns out it was because Porcino suggested it because he decided to stay in Munich.  Normally the second player would move over to play the first chair but Lynn Nicholson was moving to Vegas so the trumpet section was going to shift.  That turned out to be my first lead trumpet gig.

Tony Kadleck

            Bobby Shew was the first lead player I heard who could also play great jazz. He used that sensibility in his lead phrasing.

            I studied with Lew Soloff and always admired his fearlessness, which is something needed to play lead. He could do a lot of different things, and when you’re growing up hearing him on all those records, wow! Also guys like Marvin Stamm, Randy Brecker and Alan Rubin, and Jon Faddis…it seemed like those guys were on every record in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s.

                        Of the guys I worked with, John Frosk had the sound, in my opinion: “old school,” a wide sound, with tons of overtones.  He played lead with a lot of people.  He played with The Tonight Show. They invited all those guys to go to LA when the show moved out there but Johnny was so busy he stayed here.  He was on Pizzarelli’s first record actually, ’89 or ‘90.  It’s called All Of Me.  Do yourself a favor and listen to The More I See You.  And that was when he was in his early 60’s.  Real funny guy and a super sound.  I had never heard a sound like that before. I couldn’t believe it. It was vibrant and WIDE! Like Lawrence Feldman is always telling me, “Oh man I like how you play.  Your sound has sides to it,”  which is good because I like that;  the width of the sound.  I like bells that are a little larger because I like to feel the bell vibrate.  I swear, Johnny, even if he was three guys away from you, you could feel his bell vibrate.  It was a wide, fat, enormous sound.  And he didn’t play above a high G often.  He wasn’t a screamer playing double C’s, but vibrant.  Ridiculous.  He played Chicago before Glenn Drewes.  That was his last show, but I played Will Rogers’ Follies with him around 1990-92.

Jon Owens

My early influences of lead trumpet players were generally the players on the touring bands, some of whom I saw perform live as a teenager. One memorable concert I saw was Toshiko Akioshi's band with Joe Mosello playing lead trumpet, opening up for Maynard Ferguson's band. I heard the Buddy Rich band with Eric Miyashiro playing lead trumpet among many others. I listened to tons of recordings. I got a hold of some bootleg tapes with Dave Stahl playing lead. The Woody Herman 50th Anniversary album with Roger Ingram playing lead is a particular standout. Then you had all the great horn section session players, Jerry Hey, Chuck Findley, and guys like Lew Soloff and Jon Faddis. Of course everyone heard Doc Severinsen wailing on the Tonight Show. The list goes on and on.  I have always loved that sound of a trumpet soaring over a band.

John Fedchock

            I first became interested in the jazz trombone at the age of 16, when I discovered recordings of Urbie Green.  His sound and command of the instrument were astounding, and his versatility in styles was uncanny.  His was the sound and style I tried to emulate most in my early years playing jazz trombone.  He was not only a jazz player, but one of the greatest lead trombonists of all time.  Even at a young age, I could recognize this from his recordings.  I discovered that he played with Woody Herman’s band in the 1950s, and immediately became a Woody Herman fan.  While I was in high school I saw Woody’s band play several times in concert.  Jim Pugh was the lead trombonist at the time, and being such a fan of the band, I made a point of buying all the albums that band released, including those with Jim.  It eventually paid off 5 years later when I actually joined Woody’s band, staying for 7 years.  I knew the style of lead player Woody was looking for, because I had studied all the great players that had passed through his band (Bill Harris, Urbie Green, Carl Fontana, Phil Wilson, etc).  I first played the jazz chair for 3 years with Woody, then moved up to the lead chair for another 4 years.  As a college student, my love for Woody’s band brought me to investigate all the other touring big bands and their recordings, and I was particularly impressed by Al Grey’s concept in playing with the Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie big bands, which had a very special and persona sound, different from others I had studied.  That got me thinking more about some of the inherent differences in lead playing in relation to the specific band and their unique style of music.

Keith O’Quinn:

            The first trombone player that really grabbed my attention was Phil Wilson with the Woody Herman band around 1964. In the band room where we rehearsed was a built-in turntable with two sets of headphones (which was a new thing to us at that time) and one of the records that was there was Woody Herman-1963, Swingin’est Big Band Ever. I was about 13 years old and had just started playing lead trombone in the Jr. High school jazz band. There is a ballad on the record called It’s a Lonesome Old Town (When You’re Not Around) and Phil plays a solo that just amazed me. I can still remember the feeling I had when I heard it back then. He comes in on a Double A and plays this gliss down into the melody that I listened to hundreds of times until I wore the record out trying to figure out how he did it. (I never did.)  He also ends the tune on another Double A.  I got my own copy of the record and listened to it all the time. I loved his approach to playing. He also played several up-tempo solos on the record that I really liked. Phil was my teacher years later when I went to college at Berklee School of Music in Boston.

             A couple of years later, when I was 15, I made my first trip to the Stan Kenton Clinics in Redlands California. There I met Dick Shearer who was the lead player with Stan’s band. Each evening after dinner the band would play a concert and I got to sit up close to the trombone section every night and really check out what they were doing. Dick became a friend and mentor to me during my high school years.

            Also around that time I discovered the incredible playing of Urbie Green, first through the record he made with Twenty-One Trombones and later through various records that I could get hold of. His lead playing had a very big influence on me. I don’t believe there was ever anyone better.

            I also began listening to a lot of jazz trombone players. My favorite was J.J Johnson and I tried to listen to as many of his records as I could get hold of. Curtis Fuller was also a favorite and I listened to him a lot on all of the Art Blakey records that he was on with Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan and all those guys. 

Mark Patterson

            I’d say my two early trombone influences as a lead player were Lawrence Brown, with the Ellington Band, and Jim Pugh, with the Woody Herman Band. Those are two quite different conceptions, really, but both had a distinctive sound that sang in a beautiful way that fit with the whole ensemble sound, meaning that their style of singing was perfect for style of orchestration and the feel of the rhythm section.

            Lawrence Brown had a way of barking out rhythm with his section that goosed the time, all the way from the Jimmy Blanton years onward; and also his sound on lyrical phrases had a ringing quality that I thought of as an ‘ar’ feel, because when I would try for that type of sound my mouth would gravitate toward a wide open feel, like saying the syllable ‘ar’, and this helped me to feel the sound singing through a legato phrase. Jim Pugh’s lead sound was distinctive too in its way of singing. I liked his use of straight tone with some purposeful vibrato to shape the end of a note within a phrase. I say purposeful because it wasn’t automatic vibrato, but it was inserted at a place which would move a long note forward.

            I think that for lead playing my conception was also largely framed by trumpet players. Snooky Young and Danny Stiles really come to mind in the recordings I wore out of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, and also the Basie band. In fact for some reason I had always thought Snooky Young was the lead player on that first record of the Jazz Orchestra, “Solid State,” and just loved the way he made the ensemble sing and made the time move and dance in such a perfect way. Then I found out that I hadn’t checked the listing very closely, and it was Danny Stiles on that particular record, so I have to name him as a favorite now!

            Anyway, the two things I love about a great lead player like Snooky are the way he can make a note sing and move, using vibrato and dynamics, though I think of it more as singing and moving, because the vibrato is used more as a singing tool than an automatic component of the sound, and the dynamics are subtle and not necessarily written, but used to move the phrase forward and shape it.