Trumpet Lessons with Arturo Sandoval
Private Trumpet Lesson with Arturo Sandoval in Los Angeles Ca!
For Serious Trumpet Players Only of all ages, and all styles…
Work on your sound, technique, breathing, and all aspects of your playing.
All Styles including:
Classical
Symphonic
Quintet
All Styles of Jazz
Small Group
Big Band
Latin
Ballads
Be-Bop and more…
Starting May 1st. 2010
Lessons available by appointment only.
$110.00 per hour Cash, or Check
Minimum One hour lesson
For Scheduling:
Contact Flip Oakes
email: flip@flipoakes.com
or Call: 760-643-1501
Holiday Trumpets
To herald the joy and warmth of the 2009 Holiday Season, Trumpet players from across Florida will join together in a spectacular performance of America’s favorite holiday tunes. This majestic group of volunteers – the Holiday Trumpets – will perform at several venues and events spreading holiday cheer. There are plans for the Holiday Trumpets to be duplicated in Indiana, New York, and Massachusetts. The UnitedFederation of Trumpet Players sponsors these events.
www.holidaytrumpets.com
Posted by Frank Vardaros, (Frankie V) Date: Monday, December 14, 2009
Categories: News, UFTP Events
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Going into battle armed with a trumpet
Bountiful, Utah (CNN) — It was two weeks after D-Day, a few miles from the bloody shores of Omaha Beach. An airstrip had been carved out of the Normandy countryside, costing the lives of 28 Army engineers at the hands of German snipers.
A lone sniper still remained in the nighttime distance.
Despite the risk, Capt. Jack Tueller felt compelled to play his trumpet.
That afternoon, his P-47 fighter group had caught up with a retreating German Panzer division. As the U.S. Thunderbolts descended on their targets, they saw French women and children on top of the tanks. After an initial fly-by, the order was given to attack anyway.
“We were told those human shields were expendable,” Tueller said.
Back at the airstrip, Tueller took out his trumpet. He’d used it on many a starlit night to entertain the men of the 508th Squadron 404th Fighter Group.
“I was told, ‘Captain, don’t play tonight; your trumpet makes the most glorious sound,’ but I was stressed,” he said. He was so troubled that he was willing to take a chance the sniper wouldn’t fire.
“I thought to myself, that German sniper is as lonely and scared as I am. How can I stop him from firing? So I played that German’s love song, ‘Lilly Marlene,’ made famous in the late ’30s by Marlene Dietrich, the famous German actress. And I wailed that trumpet over those apple orchards of Normandy, and he didn’t fire.”
The next morning, the military police came up to Tueller and told him they had a German prisoner on the beach who kept asking, “Who played that trumpet last night?”
“I grabbed my trumpet and went down to the beach. There was a 19-year-old German, scared and lonesome. He was dressed like a French peasant to cloak his role as a sniper. And, crying, he said, ‘I couldn’t fire because I thought of my fiancé. I thought of my mother and father,’ and he says, ‘My role is finished.’
“He stuck out his hand, and I shook the hand of the enemy,” Tueller said. “[But] he was no enemy, because music had soothed the savage beast.”
“Boy, you have strong lips”
Tueller had learned to play the trumpet as a child growing up in Wyoming. His mother, a nurse, died at 29, and his father, a bartender and alcoholic, left the next day — leaving Jack and his brother, Bob, orphans.
They left their home in Superior to live with an aunt in nearby Evanston. She gave Jack his first trumpet, and he quickly discovered he had a musical ear.
He was no enemy, because music had soothed the savage beast.
“In 1939, I was playing in Yellowstone Park in a dance band of 22 musicians at Lake Hotel. The famous trumpet player Louis Armstrong came up to the band during intermission and said, ‘You sound pretty good for white cats,’ ” Tueller recalled.
He asked Armstrong what advice he would give a young trumpet player. “He said, ‘Always play the melody, man. Look at them, see their age group, play their love songs, and you’ll carry all the money to the bank.’ ”
Tueller enrolled at Brigham Young University, where he met his future wife and fellow trumpeter, Marjorie.
“This beautiful brown-haired gal with luscious lips said, ‘Did you play the trumpet solo at the freshman assembly?’ And I said, ‘Yes, ma’am, I did.’ She said, ‘Boy, you have strong lips.’ Being a sophomore, I said, ‘Would you like to try me?’ She nodded, and I went over and kissed her.”
In 1941, as war clouds gathered, Jack enlisted in the Army and was sent to fighter school because he was an “individualist,” he said.
“I wanted to fly it, fire it, navigate it, shoot the guns.”
He once flew his plane through a dirigible hangar at Moffitt Field in Sunnyvale, California. The commandant was fuming mad.
“He stood me in a brace, then he kind of smiled and says, ‘We don’t want to quell spirit like that … but don’t do it again!’”
When D-Day arrived on June 6, 1944, Tueller was in the air, flying five missions.
I was an unruly child. … Music tamed me.
“I witnessed the invasion from a ringside seat. We saw 2 million men, 10,000 ships. And we just shot at everything,” he said. “We tried to help those men trying to get off the landing craft at high tide, where a lot of them were drowned.
“I remember feeling pride and sadness as I saw the bodies of 4,000 killed in two hours.”
Tueller credits common sense and his first flight instructor, a crop duster, with his survival that day — and the rest of the war.
“I learned to love low-level flying. I never came off enemy targets high. I’d lay it down a row of trees 400 knots, a foot off the ground, so all the flak would go over my head. They’d wonder where I’d gone.”
Trumpet in the cockpit
Tueller managed to fly 140 missions without taking a single bullet hole to his airplane — the name of his infant daughter, Rosanne, painted on the side.
“Everyone wanted to fly it; they thought it let a charmed life.”
And on each mission, Tueller carried his trumpet in the cockpit.
“I took it in a little canvas bag attached to my parachute. I figured if I ever got shot down, it would go with me, and if I survived and got put into a prisoner of war camp, I could get an extra bar of soap from the guard.”
His tour of duty ended just before his fighter group left for Belgium and the Battle of the Bulge. Three months later, his plane was shot down and destroyed. The pilot was killed.
Tueller went on to fight in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and served in the Pentagon during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War. He retired in 1966 as a colonel, having earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, almost two dozen air medals and two Legions of Merit, the nation’s highest peacetime award.
Now 89, Tueller takes care of Marjorie, his wife of 68 years, who has Alzheimer’s disease.
As Veterans Day approaches, he has a word of advice to veterans: “When you become a veteran, it’s my opinion that you should do everything to make people realize the wonderful life that you really have.”
He still has his trumpet of 70 years and still performs at schools, family get-togethers and church functions. He has a stereo system installed in the back of his family van, where he inserts a CD of big band music and begins playing the melodies of a bygone era.
“I was an unruly child,” he said. “Music tamed me. … My ambition as the last action on my part as a veteran is to hit high C and fall right into the grave. What a way to go!”
Posted by Frank Vardaros, (Frankie V) Date: Sunday, November 8, 2009
Categories: Articles, News, Videos
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Gillespie’s Goddaughter Blows Her Own Horn
September 29, 2009 – As the Jewish Day of Atonement came to a close Monday, worshippers in synagogues around the world heard one last blast of the shofar, the ram’s horn.
It’s blown mostly on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, and then after Yom Kippur, the shofar-blowing season is over. At synagogues, it’s traditional for a member of the congregation to blow the ram’s horn.
At Adas Israel in Washington, D.C., Jennie Litvack takes on that role. The shofar player had a close relationship with the great jazz trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie, who called her his goddaughter.
Litvack tells NPR’s Robert Siegel that a shofar is usually about 3 1/2 feet long, and each one plays differently. She describes the four types of notes — the Tekiah, or medium length; Shevarim, or three short notes; Teruah, which is nine staccato notes; and Tekiah Gedolah, where “you take the biggest breath you can and hold it as long as you can,” Litvack says.
“At home, I’m normally able to do about 40 seconds, but this year during the services — with a little bit of divine inspiration, I guess — I was able to do 52,” she says. “My son was counting with his watch.”
As for her relationship with Gillespie, Litvack says she got to know him when she was 12 years old.
“My dad took me to the Rising Sun, a wonderful jazz club in Montreal, to hear Dizzy Gillespie play,” Litvack tells Siegel. “And afterward I went up to him and asked him if could try his trumpet. He had a famous trumpet that bent upwards. I played, and I think he was impressed, so I asked him if I could have a lesson with him. So he invited me the next day. And I went in.
“My mother was waiting in the car outside. She waited for four hours before she finally knocked on the door because we just hit it off. And after that, he just decided that he never had children of his own, so he decided I was his goddaughter. We developed a very special relationship.”
Litvack says playing the shofar is something Gillespie would do, but she never saw him or heard him do it.
“He was a Baha’i,” she says. “We used to have great conversations about Judaism and Baha’ism and the oneness of mankind. But I do say when I play, I also feel Diz, I feel his connection with me, and that feels really special.”
Fred Mills killed Monday in a wreck east of Atlanta.
University of Georgia music professor and renowned trumpet player Fred Mills was killed Monday (9/7/09) in a wreck east of Atlanta.
Mills died after a single-car crash in Walton County, according to the Georgia State Patrol.
State Patrol spokesman Lt. Paul Cosper said Mills, 70, was eastbound on U.S. 78 in Monroe when his vehicle ran off the road and overturned.
Born in Guelph, Canada, Mills was a founding member of The Canadian Brass, making over 40 recordings on several record labels and performing with the famed brass quintet at over 3,500 concerts in Asia, Europe and North America.
Mills joined the UGA faculty in 1996. In addition to teaching trumpet, he coached a graduate brass quintet, The Bulldog Brass Society.
According to a biography of Mills on The Canadian Brass Web site, Mills was for six years the principal trumpet with the New York City Opera.
Mills was also a former member of the Houston Symphony Orchestra and the American Symphony Orchestra in New York.
“The trumpet world has truly lost a legend,” said Ray Vasquez, assistant professor of trumpet at Auburn University. Vasquez called Mills “an inspiration to us all.”
Mills performed this past weekend at the Pentabrass International Brass Festival in Quincinetto, Italy.
Ronald Romm performs “Amazing Grace” at the memorial service for Fred Mills. Romm and Mills were the trumpet players in the Canadian Brass for almost 25 years. Mills was on the faculty of The University of Georgia when he died. This performance was given on September 20, 2009 at Hodgson Hall in Athens, Georgia. Romm is currently on the faculty of The University of Illinois.