Music: Trumpets Are for Extroverts

Everybody was there—Roy Eldridge and Gerry Mulligan, Count Basie and Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner and Ella Fitzgerald and a gaggle of other big-name jazz artists—as the fourth Newport (R.I.) Jazz Festival opened last week with the authority of an established institution. On opening night, there was a moist-eyed party in honor of Trumpeter Louis Armstrong’s 57th birthday, which Louis ended on a sour note by blasting out The Star-Spangled Banner and stomping off stage when he found he could play only 13 numbers. Eartha Kitt undulated her way through a 15-minute dance history of jazz, to the music of Dizzy Gillespie’s band. In spare moments the jazz pedants gathered in panels and discussed serious things, e.g., “Working Conditions of Jazz Musicians, Present and Possible.”

Slushy Beat. Criticism from the local inhabitants had died to a few back-terrace whispers (Sponsor Mrs. Louis Lorillard characterized the festival’s early opponents as “not socially secure.”). In fact the only really surprising sound at last week’s festival came not from the familiar names but from a 28-piece band whose performers averaged only 14 years of age.

The Farmingdale (N.Y.) High School Band displayed the driving big-band style of a Count Basic or a Woody Herman, the fancily punctuated choruses of sidemen who have played together for years. With a lazy, slushy beat, the band swung into A Ghost of a Chance, faded while 14-year-old Andrew Marsala launched an intricately woven alto-sax solo, then came back strong and brassy, only to fade again before Marsala’s languorous solo finish. Although some of the band members could scarcely reach the floor with their feet, they never lost the instinctive surefire phrasing that produces the big band feel. The audience gave them the first standing ovation in the festival’s history. Said one jazzman: “I thought they would be good, but they’re great.”

Shake a Fugue. Farmingdale’s Band Director Marshall Brown, 36, is the writer of more than 200 pop songs (Seven Lonely Days, Banjo’s Back in Town), a former trombone and bass player and the holder of a graduate degree in music from Columbia. Hired to teach instrumental music in Farmingdale, he persuaded the high school five years ago to let him weed out the best players from the concert band and train them as a jazz group. “I felt,” he says, “that the standard band repertory was too limited and that we were neglecting the most important native music we Americans have.” He assigned tyros to instruments that seemed to echo their personalities (trumpets for the extroverts, bass to the intellectuals who “don’t mind standing back there by themselves playing”), made arrangements derived from Herman or Basie patterns. He gave his youngsters a thorough grounding in jazz history and styles, firmly steered them away from standard pop music. All of the band members also play in the school concert band, and the exposure to both jazz and classical music, Brown feels, makes them better at both (“They shake up a Bach fugue like nothing human”). Nobody digs them more than their contemporaries. Long before they went to Newport, they were already looking forward to next year’s bookings in regional gymnasiums, where they will ladle out the slickest sounds most high-school prom trotters ever swayed to.