Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 12, 1993 TAG: 9303110095
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
THE SOUND OF A BIG HORN
It wasn't a typical teen-age life, either for the '40s or for now.Maynard Ferguson was playing trumpet professionally at age 13. At 15 he fronted his own band, playing til 3 a.m. six nights a week.
Together with high-school classmate Oscar Peterson, Ferguson's band - the Montreal High School Victory Serenaders - opened for every big American swing band that visited Canada in the 1940s.
It wasn't every high-school kid who had standing offers to join the Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton and Jimmy Dorsey bands.
Ferguson, who will bring his Big Bop Nouveau Band to Radford University's Preston Hall auditorium on Wednesday night, said none of it would have been possible without his parents.
"I had wonderful parents - my father was a principal and my mother was a teacher, and right from the age of 4 my brother and I started on piano and violin," Ferguson said in a telephone interview earlier this month.
But until a fateful church social, Ferguson said music was just something that got in the way of hockey in a country "where every kid wants to be the next Wayne Gretsky.
"At church I heard a trumpet player and I said, `Wow, Dad, get me one of those!' So he got me a trumpet and my brother a sax, and that was it."
Ferguson added that his father "loved music, though he only played the banjo - but I forgave him for that."
The trumpeter went on to stints in the progressive American Boyd Raeburn band and the Jimmy Dorsey band, but it was in the Stan Kenton organization that he became a star. Kenton allowed Ferguson plenty of scope for his screaming, wide-open and super-high lead playing.
His approach to the trumpet has changed little, though Ferguson is notable for surrounding himself with young sidemen, exploring the latest styles and in general pushing the edge of the musical envelope.
"The average age of the cats I have now is a lot less than it was in the band I had as a teen-ager," Ferguson said. "Back then I had a guitar player who was 45 and I thought, `Man, this guy is ancient!' "
Now 64, the trumpeter travels with sidemen in their 20s. Even a partial list of Ferguson alumni reads like a roll call of jazz giants: Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Chuck Mangione, Bob James, Slide Hampton, Joe Zawinul, Don Ellis, Bill Chase and many others.
Pat Hinely of Lexington, who does a column for JazzTimes magazine and is an award-winning jazz photographer, compares Ferguson to another band leader known for encouraging younger players.
"He's like Art Blakey in terms of taking young musicians under his wing to give them a chance to become battle-seasoned," said Hinely.
Ferguson says he is delighted with the chops of younger players today, but he confesses to one small regret: The very quality of the players means the days of the big 18-piece band are over.
"It's not like the old days where one guy would be a great jazz player but he couldn't read, or another might be a great classical player but he couldn't improvise. Nowadays your young cat just out of North Texas State is not gonna be happy to play fourth trumpet or third tenor sax, whereas there were guys who would do that years ago," Ferguson said.
In the 1970s, Ferguson experimented with jazz fusion with his MF Horn band, and when the film "Rocky" appeared his group became the first big band to crack the rock charts with his top-10 hit "Gonna Fly Now."
Later Ferguson toured with his High Voltage band, a seven-piece unit that recorded some of the baddest jazz-funk of the '80s on two CDs for the Intima label. But Ferguson said he got bored with the high-tech, synthesizer-heavy band.
"There weren't enough horns. I like to work with a big horn section, even though that computer-assisted sound stuff was interesting," he said.
Shortly after High Voltage broke up, Ferguson formed his current band, Big Bop Nouveau, a nine-piece "little big band" that includes five horns and a standard rhythm section.
This is the group that will perform at Radford and which, augmented somewhat, appears on Ferguson's latest CD, "Footpath Cafe."
Despite the band's name, this is not a bebop group. "Footpath Cafe" features Ferguson's patented full-bore, big-band blowing from start to finish. Amazingly, he has lost little if any of his chops, despite what can only be described as a punishing playing style.
"I can still hit a double-high C when I need to and sometimes higher," said Ferguson, who claims his phenomenal ability to wail in the high registers is largely a matter of attitude.
"It's a question of coordination. It's like the little guy who can sometimes hit the long ball and the big guy who can't. It's in your brain, your mind, this computer that loves to go negative on you and say, `Wow, that's too high!' " he said.
"The double-high Cs have to be there because they're written. But being my own leader gives me the option of when I want to do it and when I don't."
The trumpeter's legendary chops are all the more amazing given the fact that he frequently switches off not just to fluegelhorn but to Superbone, a combination valve and slide trombone the musician designed himself.
A brass player's embrouchure - the way the lips are formed to accommodate the mouthpiece - usually is so sensitive to change that a trumpeter would never consider switching to trombone, or vice versa.
"I haven't been playing trombone much lately, and I admit that if I picked up the 'bone now and practiced for two hours, my trumpet would feel a little bit uncomfortable. But when you're playing both equally every night, you just get used to it," Ferguson said.
These days Ferguson spends a lot of time on the "flumpet," which he says is a combination trumpet and fluegelhorn designed for him by builder Dave Monette.
Ferguson is known primarily known as a full-throttle, high-energy player. "He's got the chops that Louis Armstrong had but not the subtlety. I don't think anybody would accuse Maynard of being low key," said Pat Hinely.
But Charlie Perkinson, who has hosted a jazz program on public radio station WVTF for nearly two decades, says Ferguson is "able to play sweet and mellow when he wants to."
The trumpeter's version of the Jimmy Van Husen standard "But Beautiful" on his "Big Bop Nouveau" CD is as romantic as anything Wynton Marsalis could do in a mellow mood.
Ferguson has one piece of advice for young horn players.
"Don't get hooked on any one guy, even if it's me. Go out and buy some Dizzy and Miles, some Freddie Hubbard and Wynton - the great thing is when you start sounding like yourself and nobody else."
Ferguson's performance starts at 8 p.m. Wednesday in Preston Hall auditorium. Tickets are $10 for the public, $5 for children, free for Radford students with ID.