The Wall Street Journal
MUSIC
This Young Trumpeter Can Tell a Story
By NAT HENTOFF
March 25, 2004
In my youth, jazz musicians who admired the listening acumen of a colleague
would say, "he has big ears." That describes jazz critic Stanley Crouch, a
former drummer, who in 2001 wrote of 27-year-old Jeremy Pelt that he was "perhaps
the next great young trumpeter."
Mr. Crouch was right. Mr. Pelt, who has been an active part of the New York
jazz scene -- from small combos to the Mingus Big Band, and as a leader, too,
since graduating from Boston's Berklee College of Music -- was designated a
Rising Star by last year's Down Beat Annual Critics Poll, a Best Emerging Jazz
Star by the Jazz Journalists Association, and won the Ascap Young Composers
Award.
Hearing Mr. Pelt, I was immediately reminded of the deeply, searchingly
lyrical trumpet player and composer Booker Little, whom I recorded in 1961 for
Candid Records ("Out Front"). He died that year at age 23, but the few recordings
he made have influenced many jazz players since, very much including Mr. Pelt.
"My own feelings about the direction in which jazz should go," Booker Little
told me back then, "are that there should be much less stress on technical
exhibitionism and much more on emotional content, on what might be termed
humanity in music." Of all the emerging jazz trumpet players I've heard since then,
Mr. Pelt most fully exemplifies the pursuit of that goal.
Another of Mr. Pelt's influences was the late Chet Baker. "Chet got into my
sound," he told jazz writer Doug Ramsey in his notes for Mr. Pelt's CD,
"Profile." "I was more conscious of tone, rather than of just having the biggest
sound."
A key test of a jazz musician is his or her ability to play and personalize
ballads -- and without feeling the need to eventually double the tempo to swing
more overtly. The master of jazz balladry, tenor saxophonist Ben Webster,
could -- like Mr. Pelt -- swing powerfully on up-tempos, but said: "I like the
pretty things. I think they say more."
Mr. Pelt's newest CD, "Close to My Heart" (
www.maxjazz.com; on Amazon and in
stores), also reveals his discerning search for songs not in the usual
playbook of today's younger jazz players. By contrast with Mr. Pelt's previous CDs --
"Profile" (
www.bluemoon.es) and Insight" (
www.crisscrossjazz.com) -- which
were full of his own compositions, there are no Pelt originals on "Close to My
Heart."
But on Duke Ellington's seldom heard "Don't You Know I Care" and the Dorothy
Wayne and Ramono Rasch's "It's a Beautiful Evening," Mr. Pelt's trumpet has
the intimacy of an overheard private conversation. And on "All My Life" by
Sidney Mitchell and Sam Steept, he becomes startlingly, darkly moving.
Mr. Pelt, in conversation, says he is much concerned, in his playing, with
telling a story. And he is much taken, in his reading, with the "dark side" of
plays and novels. "I'm not naturally a dark person myself," he adds, "but I
look for that kind of drama, and that's why I go to Shakespeare's tragedies."
Listening to Mr. Pelt's graceful approach to the Cy Coleman and Joseph
McCarthy "Why Try to Change Me Now?" I remembered the legendary tenor saxophonist
Lester Young telling me that he would not play a ballad unless he first learned
the lyrics so that, while putting himself in the song, he would not distort
the composer's intentions. And then Young said that he most often learned the
lyrics from interpretations by Frank Sinatra.
I told that to Mr. Pelt, who said: "It's very encouraging to hear that about
Lester Young, because I've learned through the years that to play a ballad as
effectively as you might sing it, you have to know the lyrics. And it was from
Sinatra's recording of 'Why Try to Change Me Now?' that I learned those
lyrics, before I played it in 'Close to My Heart.' The way he delivered them, it
was almost heartbreaking."
Mr. Pelt arranged the songs on "Close to My Heart," except for those ballads
that have added a section comprising two violins, a viola, a cello and a
guitar. The guitarist, David O'Rourke, wrote the scores for the strings, which
tenderly complement Mr. Pelt's trumpet and flugelhorn. As does the flowingly
attentive rhythm section of pianist Mulgrew Miller, bassist Peter Washington, and
drummer Lewis Nash.
On Mr. Pelt's "Insight" CD (Criss Cross Jazz), I was particularly taken with
his original composition "In My Grandfather's Words." As Ted Panken of Down
Beat writes in the notes, Mr. Pelt's maternal grandfather, Hayward Smith, had
died at the age of 94 in 2000. "He had to deal with a level of racism and
obstacles that were almost insurmountable," said Mr. Pelt. "So I wanted to compose
something that caught the essence of his struggles. He's the inspiration for
this song and a lot of things that I do in life."
Mr. Pelt told me that when he was a child, "I'd spend every summer with my
grandfather in the Bronx, and he'd tell me stories about the way he had to come
up through the turmoil of the times. When he was a teenager, he'd been run out
of Virginia. A mail carrier insulted his mother; my grandfather threw a rock
at him; and everybody was out looking for him." So he had to go North. "My
grandfather was majestic, and I tried to get his sound in that song."
As for the current "Close to My Heart," Mr. Pelt told John Murph in Jazz
Times magazine: "This was a reflection of all of the music I grew up listening to
when my mother was playing Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday records, and
[it has to do with] the songs I grew to really enjoy while working with people
like Bobby Short." He calls this CD "the end of a chapter. Any other projects I
do will be all original music."
From time to time, I read that jazz has become "moribund," or that its future
is epitomized in the partially electronic bloodless music of the Swedish trio
EST, which The Economist declares "is putting new heart into an old idiom."
But that's an artificial heart. It is the beat of Jeremy Pelt's heart that, as
Booker Little predicted, underscores the future of jazz.
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