Geoff: 0:00

Hello podcats, Geoff Gascoyne here, hope you're well. Today I'm in Blackheath in London visiting a fantastic educator, trumpet player, good cook as well. His name is Mark Armstrong. He was the leader of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra for many years. A well-respected educator and a great trumpet player. He plays in Ronnie Scott's big band as well, so I hope you enjoy it. Here we go.

Announcement: 0:39

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Announcement: 0:51

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Geoff: 0:52

Hey, Mark, how are you? Good to see you. You too, hi, do you want a tea or a coffee? or anything. I'd love a cup of tea thanks, a cup of tea.

Mark: 0:59

Yes, Mark Armstrong. Hello, hello, hello, hello.

Geoff: 1:01

How are you? I'm very well. Thank you for inviting me to your lovely home. Yeah, it's great to have you.

Mark: 1:05

Yeah, just recovering from being at Ronnie's last night with a big band.

Geoff: 1:09

Were you Okay.

Mark: 1:10

Yeah, as always, it was a real privilege to play there?

Geoff: 1:12

What music were you playing?

Mark: 1:13

Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington programme.

Geoff: 1:17

Fantastic. With.

Mark: 1:17

Sarah Oshlag singing, who's absolutely killing and she's amazing. It's just great music, know. So you had a late night, I'm afraid. So, par for the course, What inspired you to be a jazz musician? I think it was listening to the music.

Mark: 1:35

I mean, I think, way back, something that was implanted in me was when I was a little boy at school, Miss Hunter, who I think I might have had a bit of a shine to, um sort of left the school and some music was put on and I didn't know what it was, but I had a bit of a shine to um sort of left the school and some music was put on and I didn't know what it was, but I had this kind of almost kinesthetic experience. It was just all these incredible colours. You know, I feel wow, what is that? That sounds amazing, and I didn't know what it was. I think it was probably some big band music.

Mark: 1:59

One of the things that's been really interesting for me is, all the way through, it's always been this kind of curiosity about it, so doing that. And then, of course, I started to play, because I was so lucky to be brought up in Buckinghamshire where they had incredible school music. So I played. I mainly did classical music. My dad played the piano a bit, but my parents are not jazz fans and they're not professional musicians. They're music lovers, really. I just remember starting to do bits and pieces of jazz things and I remember the next time doing something that really was such an incredible, exciting thing to do was playing Splanky with a little youth big band in the middle of the Bucks County Wind Ensemble course or something.

Mark: 2:40

It was so exciting. I was really, really excited to do it. And then gradually getting into it like that, and doing the Aylesbury Music Centre Dance Band with this incredible teacher called Nick Kerr and Kathy Gifford as well, who were fantastic, and you know again, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, free stuff. You know it was just amazing to have those opportunities. But also from a personal perspective, it was that there was a guy called Simon who played the piano and it was another one of those things where he sat down at the piano and played all these amazing voicings. I had no idea what he was doing. It was kind of, oh, I wish I knew more about that.

Mark: 3:11

So, it's always been this kind of pursuing the sounds which excited me, and I went to Oxford University and studied music. I had a few lessons with Paul Eshelby, who was really, really helpful and a great teacher. But I still felt at the end of that that I was kind of there were things that I could hear. If I listened to Kenny Wheeler, for example, I thought that sounds amazing, but I don't quite know what's going on. It's the same, it was kind of all the same process.

Mark: 3:33

And then I felt like when I went to The Guild all after that that it's almost like all these little gaps in my knowledge gradually started to be filled up, or at the very least I knew what the things were. I couldn't do anything with them. You know that took about another 10 years, you know, before I could actually play. And the thing about the playing the trumpet is you have to maintain a sort of curiosity. I suppose you call it a growth mindset, I guess. But it's that thing of I want to get better. There's always more to do yeah you know.

Mark: 4:00

Then there's the maintenance of it as well, because the trumpet's basically a hand grenade with three buttons on it sometimes.

Geoff: 4:05

It's really interesting what you say about not understanding it, because I had a similar experience. I remember in the days when you used to go and get records out of a library. You know, I was into Charlie Parker to start with. I loved it. I loved that bebop sound, you know. And then I remember getting ESP by Miles Davis out of the library, ESP by Miles Davis out of the library, and I didn't know what an altered chord was. You know the first chord, that E altered on ESP. I knew it was important and I just didn't understand it at all. Well, I did. I recorded it onto a cassette and I left it and then, like a year or two years later, I put it on again and it was just like the door had been opened yeah it was the same kind of thing.

Geoff: 4:42

It was a brilliant feeling of all of a sudden being illuminated or something.

Mark: 4:47

Yeah, and what's so great about having it that way round, rather than someone saying, right, this is an altered chord. Yeah, explaining it to you yeah there's an emotional resonance or an expressive resonance to the sound which comes from thinking oh that sounds amazing. I don't know what it is yet.

Mark: 5:01

Yeah, and then someone explains rather than, you know, doing the whole chord scale theory thing first. You know, even though I think that's really important and it's funny enough, I had a sort of similar kind of record experience which was in the record shop in Amersham. They had a very, very small jazz section which seemed to consist of three records. One of them was Kind of Blue. One of them was a Bill Evans album called Autumn Leaves and of course, because it had Autumn Leaves on it, it was a little good thing.

Mark: 5:25

Yeah, that's a jazz tune.

Mark: 5:26

I want that.

Mark: 5:26

But the third record was James Last Make the Party Last, which was also in the jazz thing, and so fortunately I didn't buy that one. Whoa.

Mark: 5:36

I bought the first record. I bought amazingly because I thought it looked cool, on the front was Kind of Blue, yeah, which what a great place to start. I know it's totally. You know, and I still remember that that thing, the ritual of the needle drop, you know, and a little bit of crackling and stuff, and then the first dong dong. You know that's that and those things are. You know they. They really stay with you. You know those initial imprints of that.

Geoff: 6:01

It's a kind of almost a kinesthetic experience as well, yeah, yeah, Do you find that you still get surprised by things you hear, which is a brilliant feeling, isn't it?

Mark: 6:09

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean there's two sides to that. There is a danger, because if you're an educator and you're a professional musician, you know you have to sort of find a pigeonhole to say, oh, that's one of that's the thing that does that. You know that, that's how that works. But then when you hear something go, oh god, I don't know what's going on there. Or you hear someone play something, you say, oh, they're doing that. Oh god, I didn't expect they were going to do that with it though.

Mark: 6:31

And there's still that thing, when I listen to people like Woody Shaw, particularly, and you hear these lines and you kind of go, oh my god, how can you do that and what is it? You know, I want to know what that is. So there's still, yeah, that that, that feeling of surprise, you know, is so important, and I think if you're trying to entertain an audience as well through it, you've got to understand the sort of helicopter view of their reaction as well. They're not going to say, oh, yes, well, you know, you played a flattened 13th, and actually I think it's a natural 13. They don't understand the music of that level of granular detail. Why should they? You know, that's kind of our job? Yeah, but what we want

Mark: 7:05

to do is actually surprise people in a nice way, but you need to have the sort of the skills to do that with eloquence and detail, yeah, underneath it, you know.

Geoff: 7:15

So you got very much into education, didn't you?

Geoff: 7:24

Was that quite early on that you were into teaching?

Mark: 7:28

It sort of crept up on me really. I mean, I think the very first time I ever did any teaching I think I was about 18, and I was trying to teach this kid the trombone and he really, really didn't want to play the trombone. I mean, he never did any practice at all and it really taught me right from the start how patient you have to be. Did any practice at all and it really taught me right from the start how patient you have to be, you know. But I did a little bit of that and then I sort of stopped doing very much.

Mark: 7:49

And then, um, my wife, Ellie's mother, uh, worked at a school around the corner from where we are now in Eltham and, um, they needed a trumpet teacher and so I applied for that job and I was doing shows and I was doing a few gigs here and there and and doing NYJO, and like that I'd sort of turned around. A few years later I was doing, you know, two and a half days a week teaching, and that was fine. But actually, you know, I could feel that there's a great danger that you know, if you let yourself take that path completely, that there's no space for playing. So I'm always thinking about trying to get the right balance between playing and teaching. I wouldn't feel, you know, as though I could teach with authority if I didn't have enough skin in the game as an actual performer.

Geoff: 8:29

Yeah, absolutely, you were head of NYJO weren't you for many years yeah. So how did that come about?

Mark: 8:34

Well, I mean that came about from being in the band. And then Bill actually just asked me if I'd take the rehearsals. I mean I tried to leave at 25 and thought, right, well, I'll get my Saturdays back. And then Bill turned around and said, well, no, no, no, I need someone to take the rehearsals on Saturdays. Would you come and do it? And so, yeah, I mean I thought what a privilege to be able to do that.

Mark: 8:55

So I did that for a significant number of years really, and then eventually I ended up being the artistic director for 10 years, which was incredible. I mean played at the proms twice, we did some amazing studio albums, we recorded at Angel and went abroad, you know, went to Milan and played with lots of incredible guest artists. So it was an extremely privileged thing to do. I felt so lucky to be able to do that. I mean, it's a lot of hard work, you know, and there's a lot of people management and dealing with the Arts Council.

Mark: 9:25

Not that I had to do very much of that sort of administrative side of things, but it's a big organisation. It's always very interesting when you're a musician doing your thing and then obviously all that stuff happens in the background and as soon as you get involved in it, you have a lot more empathy for the admin that is needed to sort of make the performance happen. So the admin that is needed to sort of make the make the performance happen. So yeah, it was, it was. It was a great thing to do and you know there's been some incredible musicians come through the band. Um well, I mean of my generation, but also you know, when I was lucky enough to be running it too.

Geoff: 9:56

And so how did you balance being a actual trumpet player while you were in NYJO? How did? While you were in NYJO? How did that work? Well, I suppose, while you were running NYJO.

Mark: 10:05

I should say. One of the compromises I've made, and was making at that time, is that I'm more of a sideman than a sort of runner of my own projects, because I just simply haven't got time to sort of organise anything. And now I'm very happy to sort of answer the phone and say, yes, you know, when NYJO was busy I'd probably be turning a few things down. But the, you know, when NYJO was busy, probably be turning a few things down. But the main thing is to be available enough so people realize that you're still on the scene, but then also just keeping your chops together and making sure you do enough practice, trying to stay match fit, playing a little bit on the gigs. But I didn't want to get in the way of the band, you know, because it's about them, um, to try and keep, to try and keep that side of things going. But then, yeah, yeah, it's always been a spinning plates thing. People now call it a 'portfolio career'.

Geoff: 10:47

Is that what it is?

Mark: 10:48

Well, apparently. so. You can say that to people who you know have an office job and say, yes, I have a portfolio career, and they kind of nod as if they understand what that means.

Geoff: 10:56

Right, that sounds good. I like that. I like that term. I think you do, with the apps and the arranging and the library and everything.

Mark: 11:05

Yeah, sure,

Geoff: 11:06

Do you mind if I just pour a cup of tea.

Mark: 11:08

Not at all. Yeah, god do yeah.

Geoff: 11:10

This is a first having a live cup of tea pouring on the podcast.

Mark: 11:14

Great.

Mark: 11:14

Yes, do it Get some ASMR going on by doing it right next to the mic.

Geoff: 11:24

Stir it. That's going to sound great, that's going to be great, fantastic. So let's talk about improvisation. When did? you first start improvising.

Mark: 11:34

And how did you get your vocabulary? Well, I think I probably started when I was playing in big bands as a kid, in when I was about 17 or 18, and at school, and I think think I started trying to play on the blues and I think, you know, when I was at school I had a little band and we did sort of the Blues Brothers type stuff and you know playing stuff in that style. I mean, there was a guy called Duncan Mackay who was a bit older than me and in NYJO, and I heard him playing. From Birmingham.

Geoff: 11:57

Yeah, yeah, I knew his mum and dad.

Mark: 11:59

Yeah, yeah. And I remember hearing him play in a Midlands Youth Jazz Orchestra gig and thinking that sounds amazing. You know that sort of fluency and that. And then, you know, when I started to listen to Dizzy and all those people, I thought that's really how I want to start. I need to be able to do that, you know, or I want to get better at doing that. And I suppose a lot of it was kind of floundering around trying to find things that sounded kind of okay and then just picking up on things I'd heard. So I suppose my starting point was about how to improvise over. chords, came out of noticing that Miles Davis was playing a tone higher than the chord tones a lot of the time. That was the way I sort of intellectualized it. So you know if he was playing like on if it was Dm. So here's the chord tones Miles would be, going.

Mark: 12:58

So that idea of how you can make it sound really interesting by playing extensions, yeah, I think I probably didn't quite know what they were initially but thought, yeah, those are the cool sounding notes yeah, yeah, and I heard that Miles Davis called it, called them the "butter notes the butter notes yeah hey, man, play the butter notes, you know. And I sort of got that. And then I got really into dizzy gillespie because I I wrote a dissertation when I was at oxford about bebop trumpet playing.

Geoff: 13:22

Cool.

Mark: 13:23

And I broke a CD player. I mean, I was kind of fell between two camps because I didn't have that many records. I had a load of CDs and I think people when they transcribe with records would slow them down, you know, and on a CD of course you can't do that. And so I was skipping backwards and forwards trying to sort of get whether a particular lick had a semitone or a tone in it. Eventually the CD player just gave up. I realised, you know that doing your own transcriptions helps you to really understand what the language is. But then I started doing some slightly earlier jazz and I remember having to do a presentation with Richard Michael in the Wigmore Hall. Oh yeah, so it was with Richard Michael in the Wigmore Hall and it was called Blowing Like Louis.

Mark: 14:00

Louis Armstrong was a bit of an elephant in the room. Louis Armstrong was a bit of an elephant in the room. It's like, yeah, Louis Armstrong's really great. Okay, let's leave it there and kind of worry more about bebop, you know. And so it made me study Louis properly and learn some of the solos, and I had to play West End Blues, for example and the first thing I thought was oh my god, this is.

Geoff: 14:15

He's an incredible trumpet player, you know, and you just think oh, it's Louis Armstrong You think people dismiss Louis a bit maybe maybe take music from bebop onwards rather than go before that.

Mark: 14:24

Definitely, I think. I mean certainly that's what I did. I mean I started with bebop and or Miles Davis, you know, and then kind of worked backwards and forwards from there, and I think that's often quite a usual pedagogical way to get people into the music, because that's the point at which you can talk about a lot of chord changes and functional harmony, you know, and what and how to manipulate that as a player. When I was a kid, for me Louis Armstrong was the kind of guy on the telly singing Mack, the Knife, occasionally, yeah, and playing a little bit of trumpet, and I didn't have the records until later. And then when I started listening to them I was just blown away.

Geoff: 15:00

So it's interesting what you say about sort of intellectualizing. um, jazz, you said you wrote a dissertation on bebop. Yeah, how important do you think that is in terms of teaching? For years there was no jazz courses and then of late there's. It just seems to be everywhere. Don't know jazz courses. So how important is trying to put into words what exactly bebop is?

Mark: 15:21

Well, I think it's important to put it into words if that is your way, and everyone has a different way of being able to internalize the information. So the more I think about teaching this, the more I think that this is akin to learning a language, and I think that if you're, if you're lucky enough to be born in New York or New Orleans or somewhere where jazz is kind of the musical lingua franca and you're surrounded by his little child, it's highly likely I would have thought that you would kind of absorb it in a way that allows you just to access various elements of it, naturally without anyone actually having to explain it to you. But I think for people like me, as a you know, white, middle-class guy from from London, it's a bit like learning a second language, and that's my way. Just because of the way my brain works. I need to learn the rules of the game, but then there's a point at which you need to internalise that, and then it's the equivalent of going and living in Paris for a month, and then you can start to speak it more fluently and understand more about you know, the way you interact with people too, which is so important, and the thing that made me think about this was that I went out and did some teaching on the Brubeck Colony course through NYJO.

Mark: 16:35

It was another amazing experience. One of the things was that there was this guy who I gave a little trumpet lesson to and he made all the right sounds. He was a young guy, his tone was right, his time was really good, articulation, all those things were really fantastic. But and he was playing lines that sounded like jazz, but he wasn't really playing the changes, but it sounded really convincing. Um, whereas I think someone of an equivalent level in the UK it's more likely that they'll play stuff that fits with the harmony because they've been taught that, but it won't sound right, they won't have the right tone, they won't have the right kind of approach to it, they won't have the right accent you know Right, so.

Mark: 17:12

So I think that there is something in that that if you're surrounded by, you can learn. It's like kind of, you know, unpeeling the onion layer by layer from the outside, yeah, versus growing it from seed, yeah. I don't know which way around is which, but there's different approaches to that idea of internalizing, absorbing things. But I mean essentially, for me, I think I need to deal with time first and foremost, the most important thing, which is not just you know it's groove and feel, but also rhythmic placement, and when you're soloing you know where to play and when not to play, and then melodic contour, and then the third thing is the harmony, after that. Now it's got to sound like jazz and it's got to swing, and then you can plug in the more complicated bits of stuff that are to do with harmony after that.

Geoff: 18:00

So this is the technique that you use if you're teaching someone from the start.

Mark: 18:05

Yes, it's easier with younger pupils to say no tongue that harder, no, tongue that harder. Yeah, now that sounds great. You can hear it, can't you? And you know they have that visceral response to changing the way they play to suit the style. It's much harder because I teach at the Royal College and I teach a lot of students who do jazz as a sort of bolt-on part of it, So presumably they have good technique to start with.

Mark: 18:25

Yes, they have great technique but also they want to be classical musicians quite a lot of the time and also they're still finding their feet. You know they're in amongst their. I don't know if this is a thing really, but that idea of 10,000 hours practice, they're in the middle of doing that. So when someone like me comes along and says, no, I don't want you to play the way that you're trying to play, because it's wrong for this style, obviously that can cause quite a lot of cognitive dissonance. Then also to say to them look, if you change the way you play to suit a different style, you're more likely to get work.

Mark: 18:56

That kind of has some resonance. I try and start with placement, rhythmic placement and playing it right. If I'm like I always sort of think of it as kind of Louis Armstrong crotchets, you know, if I was to go as opposed to you know, and that whole thing of finding you know you can make crotchets swing depending on how you play them. Like there's that famous sweet solo on um Centerpiece where you go, something like that kind of sound, you know?

Mark: 19:41

yeah, yeah, it's kind of tension and release.

Mark: 19:43

Yeah, yeah so that's so, it's about time, but it's also about, you know, the way you tongue on the trumpet and the way the end of the note. It's got to be rhythmic too, you know, and that's a thing, that's a universal thing, which is, again, something that it's easy to forget. I remember actually doing I transcribed a massive Earth, Wind, Fire thing for a band I was in and I was watching Verdine White playing the bass and noticing that every single note he plays he stops with his finger pretty much, and that's why it's so. I mean, apart from the fact he just exudes this ridiculous aura, you know, but also just the actual technical side of it, which is the end of the note being as rhythmic as the start, you know, and I frequently talk about the exciting silence after the note you know?

Geoff: 20:28

Yeah, another example would be Michael Jackson singing. So when he sings, he's feeling every part of that rhythm, isn't he? Yeah, as he sings, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool, The Quartet app. Yes indeed, I believe you're a patron of. Tell me how you've used it.

Mark: 20:50

I mean, I use it to practice and I use it to teach. From a practice perspective, it's just really really great to have a load of tunes that I maybe know but also want to kind of get brush up some corners of, but then also other tunes that I think I should know.

Mark: 21:03

You know, it's like all these tunes that you've picked, thinking I should know, more of those tunes and just getting into that, that, that that language, and also be able to find it easily and see it. And, obviously I hope that I don't need to read the chords of you know All The Things You Are anymore, but with the ones that I the ones I do need to read I can see them going past and I can have it in my key. So, yes, of course I can transpose from a c lead sheet, but actually there's enough going on in my brain to not have to deal with that as well as trying to play over something you know. So I'd much rather see it in B flat. And then the backing tracks sound great. You know, it sounds like I'm playing with, with well, I am playing with you and with you know, and with Seb, and you know who's on. Who? Is it? Graham?

Geoff: 21:47

Is it Graham on piano?

Mark: 21:48

Yeah, I mean it just feels really good. So there's a really nice balance of it feeling live and feeling like there's some interaction, but without you feeling like you're being driven down a particular path.

Geoff: 22:00

But there's enough interaction on there, isn't there to give you a little bit of a boost when you're playing? Yeah?

Mark: 22:05

it feels like you're playing with human beings and it feels like there is a conversation going on, but it's not like it's a conversation with someone that isn't you playing the solo part if you know what I mean.

Mark: 22:16

The other thing I use it for a lot is I use it a lot in teaching now and it's really great to be able to remove the piano and have people just playing along with bass and drums if they need to, and doing it, particularly at the Royal College where I've got this kind of mixed groups of students and there isn't necessarily a rhythm section or there's a piano player, but you know they don't have enough. You know it's too difficult for them to comp at the same time, so I can put that on and get them to play along with it. Great, And they can put it on the screen. I can cast it from my iPad and put it on the screen. They can watch it go past and it's really easy to find everything in one place and you can look at the chords and you can have the backing track, rather than, oh, I'll just find a lead sheet from somewhere else and I'll find a backing track from somewhere and kind of faffing around.

Geoff: 23:02

I presume you've seen the new playlist feature, have you? So you can search all 500 tunes now across all four apps. That's right. Which is, I think, is a game changer. It's great. And search by keywords, search by composer, by tempo, and all that stuff. Uh, and here's that 10 pounds for for the um, for the plug. Thanks, thank you for that. Yeah, no problem. So I asked you to pick a tune to have a play on. Yeah, um, obviously you've got five o to choose from what. What did you choose?

Mark: 23:29

Well, I chose 'Cherokee' Okay.. And and one of the reasons why I chose it is because I do practice this quite a lot with Ab ersold t e thing thing. Okay, you know, so it's quite interesting to compare it. Okay. Because the other thing Abersold that the Abyssal one I've got inexorably goes through all 12 keys.

Geoff: 23:45

That's not necessary is it.

Mark: 23:46

No, well, yes, well, I suppose it is. Well, certainly you feel like you've done enough practice when you've done that, so it's quite nice to actually do it, just in the normal key for a few questions.

Geoff: 23:55

I should just say that for people who don't know, younger listeners, that the Jamey Abersold play-along series was massive, wasn't it? When we were growing up, you know, you used to buy the records and a piano, bass and drums trio. It's basically what we're doing here, but on a record.

Mark: 24:18

And there was a lot of volumes. There was a couple of hundred different volumes of it, wasn't there? Some of them have more energy than others yeah, um, should we put it that way? And and some of them are more accurate than others. Yeah, um, and uh also, of course. I mean from a logistical perspective, you, you couldn't control the number of choruses. So you know, what's what's brilliant about about Quartet and is that you can decide how many choruses you want to play yeah, um, rather than it going on for nine or ten or eleven or twelve choruses, and you know, you sort of feel a bit locked into that.. yeah Yeah, So, so you're going to play Cherokee.

Geoff: 24:45

I remember seeing Wynton Marsalis play Cherokee. He would. He would always play it really fast with me and yeah, I saw him at Ronnie's playing off mic and it was just the most amazing thing I've ever seen. So do you think it's a kind of a rite of passage for someone to be able to play Cherokee like that?

Mark: 25:00

Well, I think so. I mean, there are certain tunes that I think everyone should be able to play. Yeah, um, I mean, and also, if you think of the way Park used to practice I mean Cherokee was one of the tunes he played, actually in all 12 keys and rhythm changes, and a couple of others I think as well, and so, but the thing is that if you can get that together, the nuts and bolts of so much of what you find in other tunes, with two, five ones, happen in Cherokee. Yeah, you know, and there's also that whole thing of secondary dominance. You know, there's a, there's the flat seven dominant, and then there's the chord two as a dominant yeah, which will likely take A train.

Geoff: 25:32

Second chord and take the A- A train. You know that thing.

Mark: 25:34

And the idea of using, you know, lydian dominance. You can do that and you can. You know it takes you through some sort of slightly kind of gnarly keys and you have to work out whether you can play. You know, in my D flat major, yeah, so it's 64 rather than 32 bars, so you've got room to sort of stretch out a little bit and kind of have space, you know, to try things out.

Geoff: 25:56

You're going to play two choruses. First chorus will be a two-feel from the bass. Second chorus is in four. Your introduction will be the last eight bars.

Mark: 26:06

All right? Okay? Okay.

Geoff: 26:07

Here you go. In the words of Martin Hathaway "no mistakes, ha-ha, ooh, that's fast. Thank you, guitar solo. Thank you, yeah. Yeah, And relax. It's exhausting, isn't it y? Can't do such an intense tune.

Mark: 28:22

It is yeah.

Geoff: 28:23

It's amazing though. Yeah, how did that feel?

Mark: 28:26

Great, yeah, Sort of for half ten in the morning, yeah, but yeah, it's just so. It's so nice that it it just keeps you in time and but feels, you know, it's kind of encouragingly keeping you in time. It doesn't feel like we're being sort of roasted, you know, it's just it's there, yeah, and it's a great feel you know, Through that you were playing some rhythmic things, some really kind of interesting, rhythmic groups of things. Yeah.

Geoff: 28:59

Can you talk us through some of the ideas that you had while you were playing them?

Mark: 29:02

I really, like you know, Winton's approach to this kind of stuff, and I mean all the way back to Marsalis Standard Time Volume 1, where he does all these things with the time, like I mean I was doing something which is kind of groups of five. Yeah. Was it five or? Seven. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark: 29:22

Da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, yeah, and then the thing with that thing is to do it through the time. Da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da. You know that gun get gun get gun get gun get gun get gun and the other one is is seventh, which are fun as well.

Mark: 29:35

So it's like um, um, um, um um, um, um um um, um, um, um, um, um um um, You're trying to find a way of cadencing it so that you actually come out of it. I mean, that was another one of those things that I remember hearing and thinking this sounds amazing, I don't know what's happening, and so my way of dealing with that was actually I had to write it down, I had to work it out, intellectualizing. I worked out that if I want to play in five, it's going to have to sort of be divisible by five. So, if, I'm playing over the last four bars of a sequence, I need to do that over 15 beats.

Mark: 30:13

Yeah, so I need to start on beat two. So it's like a one, two, three, four, one Ba ba ga ga ga, ga, ga, ga ga ga ba. Yeah, yeah, yeah and I'm out on one.

Geoff: 30:23

It's so funny. You should say that my brain must work exactly the same as you, because I've thought about this sort a lot as well. Yeah, you ever do triplets in groups of four Yeah that's a great one, isn't it?

Mark: 30:36

Yeah, particularly that kind of that kind of tempo, that kind of thing yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah, like oh, it's so good, isn't it?

Geoff: 30:54

So did you take anything specifically from Wynton? Did you transcribe any of his ideas?

Mark: 31:00

I sort of transcribed a bit of the Live at Blues Alley one but then the other one on the album. You know he kind of goes like that's more of a gesture. I thought, oh yeah, I can hear what's going on in that. But then in terms of the language on the 2-5-1s, I guess a lot of that is, I guess I'd describe as my generic kind of beboppy, get round some changes, language. I like the idea of playing over guide tone extensions.

Geoff: 31:30

Guide, tones, extensions, So what I mean by.

Mark: 31:32

that is so if I'm playing over the first, 2-5-1. So I'm playing the 9th on the 2. I'm playing the flattened 13th on 5. Then back to the 9th on 1. So you get. That kind of thing.

Geoff: 32:07

Yeah. So the 9th drops down a semitone and becomes the sharp 5 and drops down. Yeah, it's kind of good voice leading, Absolutely yeah, and the idea of it's kind of good voice leading absolutely yeah and the idea of using those kind of things as a skeleton to to construct lines.

Mark: 32:18

But the other thing which is the challenge on the trumpet in particular, is doing that kind of abrupt change of direction, you know. So I'll try and combine that together, So kind of moving around and coming backwards and forwards. There's two things about that for me. One of them is the idea of the contour being interesting. But the other thing is that if you make an abrupt change of direction and you're playing a bunch of quavers, you build in an internal syncopation like this, like when, like this. So if I'm just playing da ba, da, da ba, da, ba, da ba and then I kind of have to change direction, at that point it's almost like, actually, if there's a skeleton through the harmony of those extensions, you can have a skeleton of hits. So you might be going one, two, three, four, da ga, da ga, two, three, four.

Geoff: 33:19

It's like having a framework or a scaffolding, isn't it? Around a building?

Mark: 33:21

That's right, yeah, and so there's a harmonic scaffolding which informs the melodic contour and there's a rhythmic scaffolding which informs where the lines stop and start, and all of it's about tension and release. It's not just harmony having tension and tension release, it's the direction of the line, it's also rhythmically what you do. Yeah, and again, this is stuff that because I had, I've had to explain it when teaching is, when I start to do that I think, oh yeah, but a lot of the time you know it's kind of well, why don't I do that? You know what you should do. You should practice like this, Practice what you preach, And then I say I should do that, I should not you know.

Mark: 33:54

So one of the really interesting examples for me is like if you compare Four right, Four and Pedido, right, which on page look exactly the same Four the composition, yeah so it's just three quavers in a row, you know, so you do one two, which is on the end of four, with one, two. So when it's one, two, three, it's just one quaver different yeah but it's completely different in the way it sits yeah and the way it has cadence in it yeah the other one.

Mark: 34:33

That's interesting is how the end of one and the and of three feel really tense, whereas the and of four and the and of two are the pushes into the strong beats. So if you listen to Red Garland comping on Cooking and Relaxing most of his comping's on the and of four and the and of two and it just feels like it just feels really great Because it's soft and it's lovely, yeah, But it's also a little bit.

Mark: 34:55

It's more tense than the beat, but it's almost like a hip replacement of beats one and three, whereas when you've got things that go one, two, mm, mm. It's not a little darling. It's on the end of one which is kind of tense Da, da, da, then it resolves, yeah. Yeah, it's not a little darling, it's on the end of one which is kind of tense, then it resolves.

Mark: 35:18

But it resolves onto a point of slightly lesser tension, but it's still not. If I was to play this Two, three, you know it's almost like a gag. No, because it just sounds corny, it's just that little bit of extra syncopation. Yeah. So the inbuilt tension, you know rhythmic tension, the way you resolve it is fascinating.

Geoff: 35:45

Yeah, it's amazing to hear you talk like this, because it's you know. You've obviously thought about this stuff a lot. You do quite a lot of teaching, you've had to tell people about it and it's lovely to hear you say all that. It's brilliant. I'd like to finish off with a few questions, if that's alright ? Sure, What's your favourite album?

Mark: 36:09

Okay, well, in the moment, the one that, immediately, as soon as you said that I'm gonna say Music for Large and Small Ensembles by Kenny Wheeler, that's the one that made you thought, oh yeah.

Geoff: 36:17

So that's a great choice. So the Kenny Wheeler album, Large and Small, yeah, I mean what a brilliant album that is. Yeah, do you have a favourite musician, alive or dead, you'd like to play with?

Mark: 36:27

Well, I mean I, I guess I'd love to have played with Elvin.

Geoff: 36:34

You know, Elvin Jones or Philly.

Mark: 36:37

You know, yeah, to feel what it's like, you know, with someone like that.

Geoff: 36:42

You know, back in the 90s and stuff, I used to run my own band. I used to play at Ronnie's a lot, you know where you could play for a whole week and I remember supporting Elvin Jones a few times, wow. And one night I approached him and said could I just, could I sit in, I'd love to play with you. He was lovely and he said yes. He said yeah, okay, great. And I came this close, and his wife came in just after that and his Japanese wife and said no, no no, no we don't allow this, but he was.

Geoff: 37:08

He was totally up for it.

Mark: 37:09

So I came this close to playing with Elvin yeah I know I have played with Carl Allen, which is pretty amazing. In America there is a thing about people's time like that. It's very generous, but it's also really authentic and it's very, very exciting.

Geoff: 37:26

Is there a highlight of your career so far? The best gig moment? Best gig moment.

Mark: 37:33

The thing about playing the trumpet is the best gig moment is where you feel like you've you've kind of done a good job. One of the really big privileges and joys of my career has been was working with Stan Tracy and making an album with Stan. I suppose in many ways that's a that's a pretty big highlight. So I was lucky enough to be on Stan's last album, which is called The Flying Pig and it was kind of themed around the First World War and I played with Stan a lot and I played with Clark a lot as well. I was in Clark's Quintet for about seven years with Zori Rahman and various other incredible musicians, Simon Allen, Peter Billington, yeah, so that association I really feel like working with. Well, Stan and Clark gave me a sort of a hotline to you know the heart of, if you like, kind of straight ahead British jazz and you know doing things like the Appleby Jazz Festival. And the first time I got a call from Stan he said "are you crazy enough to come and do a gig tonight in Manchester?

Geoff: 38:31

It's like yes, of course I am. You know, yeah, fantastic. I played with Stan a few times too. He was the English Thelonious Monk, wasn't he? What was the last concert you attended?

Mark: 38:43

The last concert I attended, I think, was my son's concert with his school. He's just leaving school now he's in the sixth form, and he seemed to try and do as much as he possibly could, so he sang a solo. It was part of a kind of semi-chorus, in a Beethoven piece, Choral Fantasia. He played the horn in Brandenburg II and then he played the bass upright bass, in the orchestra as well. Wow. And so, yeah, I think that's probably the last thing I went to. Actually.

Geoff: 39:13

Yeah.

Mark: 39:13

Yeah.

Geoff: 39:14

What would you say was your musical weakness?

Mark: 39:17

Oh, you could probably hear it, I'm not really leaving enough space. That's something I need to work on. Sometimes I find I can let it happen and I think it's also. I think, allied to that is I have to really make sure I don't think too much about what I'm trying to play, and again, it's practice, the practice what you preach things. I say, well, you know, you practice all these things in this particular way and there's some popular things, oh, these things in this particular way, and there's some popular things. Oh, perhaps I should actually do some practice and kind of playing improvised music, rather than just doing the nuts and bolts, trumpet stuff, but then also to say, well, but when you perform, just play, you know, but don't get too overexcited.

Mark: 39:57

I mean, I'll talk about this idea of the venn diagram of feeling excited and then where sounding exciting is yeah and making sure that those overlap enough, because a lot of the time, particularly on an instrument like the trumpet, you think it feels great. Yeah, it feels great, yeah, but how's it coming across? And also that whole thing of where's your brain at. And I think sometimes maybe you're a bit distracted, you're a bit grumpy or something, and you play something and then someone comes up afterwards and they say, oh, that was great. And then you kind of say, well, thank you. And then you think, yeah, but why, why was that better? I don't quite know. So I suppose my weakness is it's around that kind of area. It's kind of understanding more and more what sounds good and also leaving enough space.

Geoff: 40:39

While you're soloing, is your flow interrupted by, maybe, the thought of licks or thought of putting rhythmic things in, or do you think all that happens

Mark: 40:48

naturally. I think quite a lot of that happens, reasonably naturally. What interrupts me is when I find myself trying to play something that I can't quite play, and particularly it's normally a kind of skip, like a big, wide interval wide intervals are very challenging on the trumpet and I try and do that or if I try and play something which is high and I've not set myself up properly to do that. Okay, so those are the things that interrupt the flow and those are, those are frustrations. A technical thing, it's a technical thing on the trumpet find yourself getting a bit muddled um around how your fingers synchronize with you, with your lips sometimes. Those are the kind of things that cause splits and those are frustrations. You know and that, and you think and of course you're out of the flow because you're frustrated with yourself. You know.

Geoff: 41:29

So, leading on for that, I suppose the next question is do you ever get nervous on stage?

Mark: 41:34

Not very much anymore. I suppose I had it burned out of me. I had two experiences which, for me, were the most nervy things. The first one was conducting the first prom with NYJO. That was really, really, nerve-wracking.

Geoff: 41:47

At the. Albert Hall.

Mark: 41:51

At the Albert Hall, live on the telly and on the radio and directing the band and everything you know. That was pretty full on, you know, and so I thought, well, if I can do this, nothing else is going to feel anywhere near as kind of as pearly really, as we say in the business. The other one experience I had was playing with the Ulster Orchestra. I was brought in to do the the sort of jazzy trumpet part in in West Side Story, symphony dancers from West Side S tory, and I remember getting about halfway through it. It's got a few jazzy bits, mostly it's classical, and I mean I've done a lot of classical music so you know it's kind of vaguely in my wheelhouse but it felt so outside my comfort zone. I remember getting halfway through it feeling my pulse and my pulse was kind of way up at about 200 bpm and I just thought, I can't survive like this.

Mark: 42:36

This is silly. All I'm doing is playing the trumpet. I shouldn't be so nervous about it. Yeah, and it was kind of almost funny that I was that nervous and it was able to sort of step outside of that and look at myself, you know, and sometimes I can feel that bubbling up, but I just think, oh, come on. One of the things that you probably find as well is that, the older you get, the more experiences you have where you're doing the same thing again and you know what it feels like. I think what makes people nervous is the unexpected. Being unprepared. Yeah, definitely being unprepared. And I think also when I was younger, you know the young gunslinger, you know it's like what's that line in Top Gun? You know your ego's writing checks your body can't cash. You know, can I get away with it? Can I get away with it? You know. Whereas, when you get older, you think, do you know what? I'm not going to chance it this time. I'm going to make it as easy as possible for myself to do well, Excellent.

Geoff: 43:26

What's your favourite sandwich?

Mark: 43:29

Oh, I'm going to say kind of pastrami on rye bread style sandwich, you know American style, Excellent. What's your favourite movie Interstellar at the moment

Geoff: 43:40

Okay.

Mark: 43:40

Yeah, you like sci-fi, I'm a huge sci-fi nut, right, you like sci-fi, I'm a huge sci-fi nut, right. The daddy is Ian Banks of intellectual well-written, you know, well plotted, you know interesting sci-fi viewers like that stuff yes, I think I probably have.

Geoff: 43:55

I mean, I like what I like Star Trek or something does that love Star Trek love.

Mark: 43:59

You know, I love Star Wars. I mean some of those things are pretty popcorn, you know, but Star Trek's quite interesting. Many things I like about what Kirk says. One of them I like is there's a film called Star Trek V the Undiscovered Country, where there's a sort of guru-type figure who goes around taking people's pain away, you know, and Kirk says don't take away my pain, my pain's what makes me who I am. Something in that chimes with me?

Mark: 44:25

I'm not sure, though, but that's a good thing. Another one that's really good is um. What is a Klingon baddie? In the same film, he says you've never experienced Shakespeare till you've heard it in the original Klingon. And then the final thing, which really explains why sci-fi is good, is um.

Mark: 44:41

Kirk says at the end of the day Spock, everyone's human, and he says Captain. I find that rather insulting, but I mean the reason why. The end of the day, spock everyone's human and he says Captain. I find that rather insulting, but I mean the reason why. More seriously, the reason why that's interesting for me is that what sci-fi does is it reveals aspects of the human condition in a different environment, that they're even clearer because you're in an unexpected environment. So I mean one of the ones that springs to mind which is so relevant, and it's a book called Surface Detail by Ian Banks, and the concept in this book is that there's this guy called Vepers, and Vepers runs all the servers for all the civilizations in the civilized galaxy who still believe in an afterlife and a heaven and a hell. Okay.

Mark: 45:25

And he runs the servers which run the hells for all these different communities. Wow. Thinking. Oh yeah, there's um bit of Elon Musk in that character, you know, but that was kind of you know. That book came out 20 years ago amazing, so ahead of its time.

Geoff: 45:40

Is there a favorite venue that you like to play in?

Mark: 45:43

Well, I mean, I was there last night. It's always an incredible privilege is Ronnie's, I mean it's just great to play there. I mean that's lovely. But I mean also I love doing those old beer tent jazz festival gigs. You know when they were on they were great. But yeah, Ronnie's is always a privilege, you know.

Geoff: 46:00

Is there a favourite country or favourite city you like to visit?

Mark: 46:04

Well, I love the south of France, that's where we go on holiday. But I mean, I've only been to New York once, to my shame. But when I did go, the energy is incredible.

Geoff: 46:12

Final question what's your favourite chord?

Mark: 46:15

Well, I think it might be a Lydian dominant chord. Okay. Yeah, so 13 sharp 11.

Geoff: 46:23

Excellent, cool. Well, Mark, thank you so much for your time. Hopefully I'll see you very soon.

Mark: 46:28

Hope, so no problem at all.

Announcement: 46:29

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