Wynton Marsalis – Trumpet

Any Jazz musician, particularly Jazz bass players, will stress the importance of listening to and transcribing solos by the great players but also those who do not play the bass. There are loads of examples on-line of bass players playing their take on saxophone solos, piano solos etc (Jeff Berlin’s ‘Marabi’ is a transcription of a Cannonball Adderley alto so, for example) Another example is that 2022 video of Mohini Dey playing Coltrane’s ‘Countdown’ solo – ridiculous. In the 1980s, having got the memo, I transcribed the head and first trumpet solo on the Wynton Marsalis version of ‘A Foggy Day (in London Town)’ from his 1987 ‘Standard Time’ record. I had forgotten about it but came across the battered paper version when I was going through some old papers this morning. It was all wrong (this is pre-computers and there was no means of slowing things down in those days) but, as Jeff Berlin always says, learning is not performance and transcribing is like everything else; when you start out, you don’t really know what you are doing and you have to learn from your mistakes. Well, I have corrected it and present it here as something that my bass-playing chums can have a look at and see what they can learn about Jazz phrasing and how a Jazz trumpeter of the calibre of Marsalis interprets the melody on an old standard like this. I Have transcribed it for bass (as I did on the original paper version) and I think it actually sits quite nicely on the instrument. There is one five bar passage of triplets that will cripple you but it’s worth spending a few minutes (hours, weeks) going through that passage to see what he is doing – pentatonics it ain’t! Lots to learn from transcribing and playing solos from horn players.

On re-listening to it, I may give the Bob Hurst bass part a crack one day soon. It sounds great.