Briefly Glimpsing Excellence, Along the Way
Excellence: An integrity of sound. You’re somehow projecting what you stand for in the sounds you make.
My grandmother went to church a lot. I got into music through her church. During services at First Truth Missionary Baptist Church, in Oakland, Ca., I would run up and bang on the piano because I wanted to be a part of it all. I can remember that feeling of being moved, of wanting to contribute. So my earliest association with music was something spiritual, something beyond this realm. In a way, that was also my first experience with a variety of excellence. There was something about having this choir of untrained singers who individually didn’t sound very great, but when you put them together a magical thing happened. I always wanted to figure out why that was. At three or four years old, I recognized that.
I continued to be taken aback by how music moved people, by its ability to bypass everything. To bypass who we think we are or what we’re willing to do or how we think we’re doing. I recognized that not only in church but also when I saw my first jazz concert and, even before that, in hip-hop.
The music I heard in the eighties and the nineties sounded like my community. Too Short. Digital Underground. They sounded like every step I took in Oakland. It was almost as if this shouldn’t even have been called music. It was all the characters in Oakland—the smell, the taste, the joy, the heartbreak, the darkness of Oakland. The weather. A strangely excellent version of home. And then when I heard Art Blakey’s Moanin’, I was back in the church I grew up in. But instead of just piano, organ, drums, and voice, all in service to a text, here it was being played on more instruments. And the horns were the text. By then, I was already playing trumpet, but I wasn’t yet playing jazz.
By my teens, when I was playing jazz, I got to play with drum- mer Billy Higgins quite a bit. Billy had mastered his instrument on both a spiritual and technical level. In that context, my experience of excellence related to integrity. An integrity of sound. You’re somehow projecting what you stand for in the sounds you make.
In the summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, I started playing with alto saxophonist Steve Coleman. We went on the road for six weeks. That was the first time I was onstage with somebody who had something they were really after. It was: I have set goals for every aspect of this, and I’m trying to reach that day and night. That inspired me then, and still inspires me. We were on a long train ride to Germany once. It was quiet for about an hour. All of a sudden, Steve picks his head up, looks at me, and asks, “What’s your concept?” I’m 19 years old. I say, “I don’t know. I got time, man. I’m just playing. I haven’t really thought about it.” And he said, “You know what’s interesting? I asked someone that exact same question at the exact same age you are, 20 years ago, and that’s what they said, too. Today, they sound exactly the same as they did then.” And that changed my life. I realized that I don’t need to arrive at something, but I definitely need to be thinking about this. Excellence is a search.
I was lucky enough to have been brought into this music by old-school musicians from the Bay Area who weren’t famous at all, who were playing music because it kept them alive. It was all about expression and being part of this lineage. Even when I met trumpeters like Roy Hargrove and Nicholas Payton and Wynton Marsalis, I was attracted to the soulfulness, the truth, in their playing more than their technique. When I went to college, that was the first time there was talk about technical excellence, these things that you can measure and you can sort of quantize. Before that, music and art was just about how well something was expressed but also how close to the source—this thing that’s higher than us—you could be, and how down in the flow of the music you could be.
At Manhattan School of Music, I began studying with trumpeter Laurie Frink. At my first lesson, I began improvising.
A couple of minutes in, she said, “OK, stop. You really don’t know how to play the instrument, do you?” My other teachers had told me, “I can’t teach you anything.” But Laurie gave me seeds for what is now a jungle. She started me on specifically focused rituals: long tones (sound); how long can you play the long tones? (endurance); movement from one passage to another (flexibility); manipulation and articulation of the notes within each passage (dexterity). Laurie set me on the path of doing these things, pursuing excellence in these terms, for at least an hour each day, for twenty-two years now.
When I think about the 2007 Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Trumpet Competition, where I was awarded first prize, I remember that one of my main goals wasn’t about me. It was about having an experience with the musicians I was playing with—creating something bigger than that moment, which is the way I approach music in general. There was this one section in “Ruby,” a piece I had written for my grandmother. At the end, there’s a vamp I wrote for drummer Carl Allen; I told him, “In this section, you and I will have a conversation about what grandmothers mean to us.” I wasn’t thinking about winning in that moment. I was thinking about creating this space to honor my grandmother, Lillian Ruby Campbell, who had recently passed away, and giving Carl a similar space. We didn’t talk about his grandmother, his relationship. It was just me, expressing my belief in the integrity of this music and in his integrity. It was me, knowing that everybody else might be thinking about technical things, but I’m thinking: I’m just going to make beautiful music because I believe in this so much. Several people came up to me and talked to me about that particular moment afterward, not even knowing what it was about.
Right after that, I entered the Monk Institute’s graduate program, then at U.S.C. in Los Angeles, led by Terence Blanchard. I knew Terence had his own ideas about excellence, and that some of them came from New Orleans teachers that I know well, like Roger Dickerson, and from Blakey, whose Jazz Messengers band Terence was once in. We also had visiting artists. One of them would think I was the most amazing player ever, and then the next week another would think I couldn’t play a single note right. Each had their own take on how to become excellent. Trombonist Hal Crook was all about pushing harder. You’ve got to really hit it, you’re not giving enough. Excellence for him was how hard you were reaching, every moment being the most critical one. Then Ron Carter came in and, man, if I missed one note he would look at me. His thing was to find and hold excellence in every note.
For most of my career, I felt like I was witnessing and facilitating excellence as a bandleader more than being part of it myself. Only in the last several years has that feeling changed. I think that change began when my quartet played the Village Vanguard in 2017, which led to a double album. Listening back to those twelve sets we played at the Vanguard, where there’s not much reverb, where the sound’s not coming back at you, where you have to really play, I heard excellence beginning to take shape, and I was right there in the middle of it.
Taking on my new role as artistic director at the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, the present incarnation of the former Monk Institute, I started thinking about what my definition of excellence would be in this context, and this has lent some clarity: Excellence is defining your own terms of success and living by those while simultaneously allowing them to grow and change. I would love to challenge each musician to define their terms of success, beyond having an amazing recording contract and beyond playing with whoever it is they want
play with.
When I first met Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter through the institute, I asked them for advice about how to become a great composer. And they each told me the same thing: Figure out how to be a great human being. I know how corny that can sound, but I think that’s really it. You have to be at a certain level and pursue deep knowledge to get there. You have to, like Steve Coleman said, have a concept. Keep your bar high, yes; that’s where shedding comes in. That’s where sounding as good as you can comes in. But do it as a way to give something to the art form, and to the communities around that art form.
The people that worked with me as I developed challenged me to think about my goals as a human being, beyond music, and they forced me to figure out how I could use music to achieve those things and how those things could help the communities that I’ve chosen to participate in. And once you’ve reached that point, if you reach that point, I think you can pursue an even higher level of excellence—the pursuit of freedom, in which freedom means the inclusion of all things.
Related articles
The Still-Rising Sun
The Spark that Stays Lit
