Bringing The Soul Out Of The Cornet

    The more I play the cornet, the more I notice the way it affects people. I was at a friend’s house the other day and  some of  his old friends from the past dropped by. My friend is in his mid seventies and I go to visit , check,  and spend some time with him about once a week.  Anyway, when I go to visit him, he always wants me to play some passages out of   Arbans and play along with some R&B recordings. This time around,  he asked me if I could play something for his friends,  because they had heard a clip of me practicing and they couldn't   believe that  I was playing an instrument.  They thought that I was  singing instead of  playing a horn.

    There is something about the tone of the cornet that is definitely voice-like. I’ve been working on bringing more of  that quality out during my playing. It has the kind of tone that we humans can immediately recognize when we here it.  Lately ,  I’ve been checking out  allot of vocalist like Sam Cook, Smokey Robinson, Nat King Cole, Marvin Gay, Minnie Riperton,  and Whitney Houston. The great cornet players of the past used to imitate opera singers and the like and I figured why  couldn’t  I do the same. Sax players do it all the time so why shouldn’t  cornet players exploit the cornets  talents  in order to imitate the great vocalist too.

    My goal was to study and translate the great vocalist ,listed above,  and incorporate   their soulful inflections and style to the cornet. Who said that we always have to be stiff and formal? Music is supposed to be a form of communication and not some mundane task duplicated over and over.  Before  I could do this, I needed to learn  how to seriously lay back on the cornet in order to get that soulful human  expression that only the cornet , in my opinion, can imitate. When I mean lay back, I mean not  being to  ridged or predictable. Everyone expects the jazz musician to swing and not play exactly on the beat which is something that can be easily taught and learned. Everyone expects the classical musician to remain true to   the piece. But playing soulful is just another thing all together.

      Playing soulful  is the kind of stuff that can’t be written down with notes, taught with a manual , and  instructional video, but it is definitely there. It is something that must be within the cornetist and it is unique to only that cornetist. It’s like noticing the wind. You cant see  it but you can feel it as it brushes up against your face, as it rustle the leaves,   kick up dust and hear it interact with objects as it goes from here to there.

   As long as cornet-players do their best to exploit the  unique abilities of the cornet , it will make a comeback. However, it is a slow process. Most of the new cornet players are transitioning over from trumpet and playing it only as a second or third choice behind trumpet and flugelhorn.. I hope to see a day when the cornet is a first choice. It can happen because there are more people than with the last few years rediscovering the cornet.