As I said before, now these
are little these are these are these are
just this is all advice,
you know, it's all I can give you right
now is advice.
And because I don't know you
individually, I don't know who's good.
There's probably somebody here that could
walk right into my back
who I don't know.
And if if you could, I
not only would be surprised, I'd be very
happy, you know, because there
is there is always that one that one guy
that can do it.
But then there's always something else he
doesn't know, you know.
And when he gets to New York, all of a
sudden he's scared.
You know, you got to get to certain
flights, you have to get over
certain panics, you have to get over
and certain people like me, you've got to
watch out for who
will tell you the truth immediately.
Wynton Marsalis said, I want this one
night. He bugged me that he wanted to sit
in with us just before he became a star.
And he still couldn't do what he couldn't
do that.
I know he still can't because I can
hear it in his playing today.
You hear him all over the radio all the
time, but you're not hearing anything
great. You just hearing a technically
wonderful trumpet player,
but you haven't heard an original note
out him yet because he has
no style. He has no conception
of his own.
He plays what he heard.
He just technically proficient.
He can play what Freddie Hubbard plays
better than Freddie Hubbard, but he can't
think beyond Freddie Hubbard
or Miles
or Dizzy or everybody
else he copies.
But we all know that in New York,
he's just getting a big hype from a
record company. And they took their
little star because they they threw out
Woody Shaw.
But Woody Shaw can play,
but he sure is a hell of a trumpet
player.
And he's Woody Shaw.
Wynton Marsalis is everybody,
you know, and he
will find out very hard one of these
days. But he said in on fourth trumpet in
our band, he was still standing there
looking. He didn't he he did
a very bad job in the section.
He didn't know how he didn't know how
to play the written part.
He couldn't figure out what we were doing
because he had no experience and
he didn't listen to the bands
and all that. And he comes from New
Orleans. They give given all this great
thing, his father would know, but he
doesn't know. I mean, how can he know?
He didn't put in the time and he had
didn't have the experience, so he didn't
know how to play a fourth trumpet part
there. But he's still standing there
looking at his notes.
And if any of you have been playing this
Thad Jones arrangements, you'll notice
they're very hard to articulate.
I mean, you don't your part doesn't go
where you think it's going to go.
You have to really.
But there's a certain way to play those
things that none of you were doing it
because you don't know how, because
you haven't put in time listening to what
he does, what the way it was done.
In a way, it's supposed to be done.
So all you can do is play the notes, but
you don't know how to play them.
I mean, how to express them.
And
so he failed.
Oh, and on top of that, he had a solo and
they were original changes and he didn't
know them. So he didn't do very well
that day. And as the band walked
off the set after that, everybody walked
by him.
He was still standing there.
Nobody said anything to him.
Hey, man, good.
You know, Gardner walked off.
I knew right away.
So when I walked off was he's still
standing there trying to figure out
what he would miss, which was a lot of
a lot of things he said
to Doug provides the bass trombone player
to be a friend of his. He said he didn't
say a word to me.
And Doug said, you're lucky.
He says that's
just as well, he didn't say anything to
you.
He never came back and
that was the next thing I know.
He's a star, you know,
and I hear his records and I
haven't heard anything different.
He's still he's a great young trumpet
player with no ideas
and no can real jazz conception.
It's very sterile.
Everything is right there.
Everything is perfect.
And that's what we don't want in jazz
perfection, because
if you get that perfect does nothing more
to strive for, you know, forget it.
You've you're so perfect.
It's that's it.
Because you'll never really try to do
things.
And I'm rambling on again
about that.
But let's get back to the big band thing,
because this is basically where my
thing is, is
this conception thing is that this idea
of widening everything
up, thickening everything up.