| Tom Harrell's career has been his commitment to
advancing his artistry.Harrell
has recorded with vocalists.Minutes II with Charlie Rose.This is
the first time I've worked with singers under my own name, but I've always
gravitated toward vocal music.One
of the first people I listened to when I was young was Louis Armstrong.He approaches the tunes as a visual artist, with color and shading
foremost in his mind.We express our
feelings through the textures and colors of the sensual material world and
then transcend that into the spiritual realm.The tune is spirited yet has a vein of
drama and mystery.Harrell wrote and Kami Lyle provided
the lyrics to.Kami's lyrics are very poetic and they touch me autobiographically when I
play this song.And Dianne, she's
such a great singer.She lives up to the meaning
of the song.For the number Harrell explored the interchange of
instrumental roles, where the trumpet plays in the rhythm section along with
the strings.It's almost like a chant.She sang this tune innovatively.The former showcases
Harrell's band, especially Greene on flute.It's got that Chicago blues sound.Michel and graced by the singing of
Cassandra Wilson.Harrell's burnished flugelhorn tone.Wise Children concludes with the striking title tune, a pensive composition
arranged and orchestrated by Harrell.In recent years, I've become more
aware of how important it is to stay in touch with your roots.The piece
started off as a piano sketch that was then expanded for three trumpets, two
French horns, bass trombone and tuba.The new disc
represents another triumph for the trumpeter, whose professional career
began in the late '60s and early '70s in the employ of first Stan Kenton and
then Woody Herman.Harrell's
solo recording career has afforded him an even higher profile and garnered
him the reputation as one of jazz's most creative trumpeters.Harrell is especially enthusiastic about Wise Children.My feeling of who I am is always changing.It's like Salvador Dali and surrealism: The minute
you feel you've got a grip on life, it's already slipped away and changed
into something else.That's the paradox of life and it brings up the role of
the artist.You can't do the same thing over and over again.You'd get bored
quickly with your work.It's more fun and satisfying to find new and
different things to do.Tom Harrell (born June 16, 1946) is a renowned American post bop jazz trumpeter and composer.He suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.When called upon to play, he walks slowly to the microphone, head still lowered, raising it only to play.Newer drugs appear to control his condition with fewer side effects.Biography and music
Tom Harrell was born in Urbana, IL and began playing the trumpet at age eight.In 1969 he graduated from Stanford University with a music composition degree and joined Stan Kenton's orchestra, touring and recording with them throughout 1969.Blue Persuasion" playing trumpet.Cuban Jazz and Straight ahead jazz with a few original compositions.We also experimented with Indian music playinig an original composition written by bassist Bing Nathan called 'Snippet' in which the melody started slowly, continuing to increase in tempo until the end which was a phrase known as a 'Snippet' in traditional Indian music as played by master Ravi Shankar.Trumpeter Tom Harrell played all these music variations with enthusiasm, deft, clarity and creativity.We were all joyous to share his music and personal talents.Tom Harrell was appearing with Phil Woods and during inermissions we had a chance to talk at length about our shared musical experiences.Tom Harrell recalled the New Orleans House shows with detailed enthusiasm.Congressperson Ronald Dellums' Oakland Headquarters office.Hopkins, a music fan, was most impressed with Tom Harrell and his music performance, meeting Tom Harrell for the first time in person."Stories' features the saxophone artistry of the late Robert 'Bob' Berg.On the drive to the restaurant, Crockett played a tape of Crockett's music on the car cassette tape player which ran slower than correct speed such that the tonality was a whole step lower than concert.Robert "Bob" Berg evidently had perfect pitch because he said to us, '(T)he tape machine is not plaing at the right speed since the tune being played was not in the correct written key.Berg and Crockett had a long conversation about his bouts with heroin addiction and Berg said he had been clean and sober for some time and looking foward to his future performing years.This page was last modified 22:18, 7 January 2008.Schizophrenia
Home
What Is
It?Tom Harrell, who suffers from paranoid
schizophrenia, has been named jazz trumpeter of the year three times by
Downbeat Magazine.Wife Angela Harrell was researching a documentary
for Japanese television on creativity and the brain when she first met and
interviewed Tom.Tom Harrell, named jazz trumpeter of the year three
times by Downbeat Magazine, is known for the gorgeous, intricate
melodies he composes.Yet the moment he stops playing, his
disorder seizes him.Voices materialize and threaten his sense of reality.But while Harrell appears in full retreat from the world, the music prevents
him from losing his place.Correspondent Charlie Rose reports.You know, like just something that was never said.But Harrell wasn't always like this, says his older sister, Sue Abrahamson.Download short video clip of Tom Harrell interview on Real
Video.When he went off to college at 18, his sister received a call
that he had tried to commit suicide.And so he had to
break the window to get out.The glass shattered, but it kept him inside.But when the topic
is music, he takes complexity in stride.Harrell, on the crossover between impressionist
painting and jazz.But when the talk turns to Harrell's illness, he becomes uneasy.Without them, he turns psychotic.Harrell is able to reach the level of
creativity he reaches as a musician.He has to face demons that you and I can only
imagine.But it's not only music that holds Harrell together.He asked me to stop the tape.But from this unpromising beginning came marriage.There's nothing not to like about the guy.Although their devotion is mutual, getting pictures of them together is hit
or miss.Trying is one thing, but succeeding is another.I'm playing
the music or whether the music is playing me.Harrell's latest CD will be released this September.Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe's Flash Player.Get the latest Flash player.This video has been added to your favorites.Thank you for flagging this video.Content of this nature is not necessarily prohibited on YouTube, however we will review this video and take action as appropriate.Per our Community Guidelines, hate speech is specifically defined in reference to "protected groups."Please refer to our Help Center for more information and the complete instructions.In order to process a privacy complaint we need more information from you.Please refer to our Help Center for more information and the form to submit.Thank you for sharing this video!Change this to see only comments above a certain value.Change the value of a comment by clicking on a thumb.It was written by Neal Hefti.What is the name of the song?My father actually learned about it in dental school.Would you like to comment?Tom Harrell and David Leonhardt "Softly..."THIS PAGE IS NOT MAINTAINED BY TOM HIMSELF.Messages with specific content are forwarded to him periodically.The latest CD, LIGHT ON, features Tom's quintet with Wayne Escoffery (tenor), Danny Grissett (piano) Ugonna Okegwo (bass) and Johnathan Blake (drums)."Are you sure you want to delete this comment?"Thanks for the add Tom, I am so honored!It's great to have you here on the friends list.Best of luck to you in 2008.Dear Tom Harrell's music, Who is the drummer on Thelonious Monk's "Rhythm a Ning ?Happy New Year Tom !!!!!!PEACE OF HEART AND MIND....Can't wait to see you play again sometime soon!Hi,I wish you a happy new year, too.Thanks for the add,it's a great honor to be one of your friend.Hi Tom,Thank You for adding me to your friends.Best Wishes in the New Year!!Thank you,I like your records,your playind,like you!!!Wishing you and Tom Harrell a wonderful new year with only good things coming your way.Happy New Years and a GREAT 8(2008)!Hi,thank you for the add.Thanx a lot Tom for the add...Hi Tom and thanks for adding me..Thanks Tom for the add, i love your music, my father too...This could be an attempt to steal your username and password.This is not a MySpace login page, please do not enter your MySpace login information (email address or password).Do you wish to continue your form submission?"Id + " Text: " + targetLink.Tom Harrell is a blessing.Warmth and kindness oozes from his horn playing and from his compositions.Horace Silver put it, unedited and in his own words.FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.TOM HARRELL: My pleasure.My parents had great records and I would listen.Then I started to try to learn more about chords and harmony so I could play chords and also I was playing in ensembles in school playing European classical music.FJ: Who were your influences at the time?Clifford Brown when I was listening to the radio in the eighth grade.Blue Mitchell and Clark Terry.Every time I heard someone and I enjoyed their playing, I would begin emulating their style.It wasn't really a conscious effort.Also, I've been influenced by saxophone players.TH: The main thing was the work and the feeling, such a positive sound and his melodic sense.He has a real full sound.FJ: Let's touch on your time in the Horace Silver Quintet.You became a member of a formidable fraternity of trumpet players, Blue Mitchell and Woody Shaw.I'm still learning from him.One thing I learned was his incredible sense of direction and confidence in everything that he did and does.When he'd come into rehearsal and when he would bring in new music, it would be so totally positive.Like sometimes, I played with composers and they apologized.He's really a friendly, warm person.FJ: Horace has a healthy sense of humor.TH: Yeah, he definitely does.That's one of the first things that drew me to his music like for instance his titles and the feeling of humor in his playing when he uses musical quotations to tell a story.TH: He's a great leader too.He's very focused too with his music and he lives his music.He told me one day when we would talk about music, he says like things he wanted to play and he wants the music to be loved and do things that have never been done before.Of course, Horace has done things that has never been done before too.They are both great innovators.FJ: To benefit the persons who are not musicians, beyond the obvious appearance, what are the differences between the trumpet and the flugelhorn?They do have different sounds.It would come out differently on each instrument because the flugelhorn has a more rounder sound, but I guess my approach to the trumpet is sort of like flugelhorn in a way because the equipment I use gets a dark sound, but still, the trumpet can have a brightness too.They had two different personalities.It sort of leads you into writing full arrangements of a song where you would write music for the large group from the beginning of the arrangement to the end of the arrangement, whereas with a quartet or quintet, you might leave more room for improvisation by the rhythm section and the horn players.The background for the solos could be still added to that and so you can have the freedom of a small group and the structure of a larger group.FJ: The sheer logistics of a large ensemble, traveling and lodging are mammoth.TH: Well, it's hard in terms of people's schedules.I'm lucky to have such a great group too at the Jazz Bakery.Everyone is enthusiastic about the music.TH: Well, they are both wonderful vehicles.Although, I admit that I have not worked as a leader as much with a big band so it's really an exciting new direction for me, but I also love playing with a quintet because of the spontaneity that you have and also if you play a song that is free blowing, you really have a lot of freedom with a small group, although you could do a big band piece with free blowing sections too.They're both really great mediums for expression.I'd love to do another small group album, but I'd also like to do some more things with larger groups.The acceptance by the audience has been wonderful.It gives me a reason to keep going.I'm really grateful that my music reaches people.I'm blessed that I can play music that I love to play and people enjoy it.It really makes everything worthwhile.That's the most important thing.FJ: What records do you deem as classics?TH: Well, I love the Birth of the Cool (Blue Note) by Miles Davis and Sketches of Spain (Columbia) by Miles and Gil Evans.FJ: What is jazz to Tom Harrell?It's like a beautiful marriage of many kinds of influences of the 20th century.Visit Tom Harrell on the web .Chief of All About Jazz: Los Angeles and is Wang Chunging tonight.Sign in to get personalized recommendations.TOM HARRELL, dressed all in black, stands in a dark corner of a crowded
Chicago nightclub.Sometimes he prefers a closet, but tonight the
corner will do.He's clearing the voices from his head, trying to stay
cool.The banalities don't stick, but
they help push aside the voices a bit, and now he is ready to go to work.Harrell shuffles out of the darkness and onto the stage, where the
four members of his band wait, and he begins shaking.He doesn't want to give the voices or
the hallucinations a chance to pop back into his head.As he
raises his trumpet, the golden spotlight strikes stars on the horn's
bell.Then
he tosses in a handful of slower, cloudier notes that curl and fade away.Harrell is one of the finest jazz trumpeters in the world.He
sits alone on a ragged sofa in a small dressing room.His wife, Angela,
ushers me into the room and makes the introduction.His head shakes, and his lips move as if he's
trying to release trapped words.He tries again to form sounds.Fifteen seconds of silence pass,
and I am tempted several times to fill the empty space with babble.Friday afternoon in August, trumpet case slung over
my shoulder.The place smells of grilled steak, which Harrell
eats, entirely without seasoning, at least once a day.After saying hello, Harrell vanishes for fifteen minutes, then suddenly
joins me at a darkwood dining room table.He appears much as he did
in the club: nervous, shaky, and reluctant or unable to communicate.He is dressed all in black, same as always, and he is even taller than I
remembered.His shaggy hair and beard have begun turning gray.Even though there are no buildings within sight of the apartment, Harrell
sometimes believes he is being watched.Quite often, he hears voices.Tom Harrell did
this to somebody.Tom Harrell did that to somebody, they say, and those
voices sometimes hurl him deep into a ravine of guilt and depression.When the voices speak, or when visual hallucinations beset him, his
shaking worsens.Tom Harrell was born in 1946 in Urbana, Illinois, and grew up in Los
Altos, California.Tom topped his father's IQ of 146,
and he early on showed extraordinary talent in music and art.By the time
he turned thirteen, he was jamming with professional bands around the
Bay Area.When he was seventeen, he went off to Stanford, and it was
at about that time that his parents and sister began to notice that the
buoyancy was draining from his personality.He became surly and aloof,
a social misfit, and, at one very low point, he tried to kill himself.Harrell has recorded a dozen albums for small record companies.But
in the past two years, since he signed a contract with the RCA Victor
label, he's begun to gain recognition outside the hardcore group of
fans who had previously followed his work.The readers of Down
Beat recently voted him the world's best trumpet player.The Art of Rhythm,
even the mainstream press has begun to take note.Harrell prefers his original
compositions to standards, He warns listeners to work as they listen,
to attempt to understand the feelings behind his songs.Sometimes he will hear
a chord in the hum of the refrigerator or the engine of a passing jet
and work the rest of the day writing a composition based on what he has
heard.Once, on a cab ride in Los Angeles with bandmate Gregory Tardy,
Harrell began weeping uncontrollably because he was struck by the beauty
of a tune on the cabbies radio.Angela travels with Harrell and helps keep him from getting
distracted.His need for intense periods of quiet concentration guides
almost every moment of his life.When he has a gig, he won't leave his
apartment or his hotel room until it is time to play.But Angela and
his bandmates account for almost all the human companionship he's got,
and he can't stand the thought of being isolated.Once, a few years ago, after his medicine caused a toxic reaction and
nearly killed him, Harrell stopped taking it.The results were fascinating
and frightening.His moods changed more quickly and furiously than
ever, from happy to sad, confident to insecure.His posture improved,
his tremors vanished, and he became something close to affable.He would
buy bags of groceries and leave them in front of his neighbors' doors as
anonymous gifts.On the bandstand, when his turn came to solo, he would
stun his audiences by scat singing in falsetto.He stares at his lap, hops
quickly from one thought to the next, and raises his eyelids only
briefly.At one point, he says he doesn't think he should go on speaking
to me, because he feels tremendous guilt for not having been born black.He begins to
cry, and he lets the tears roll into his beard.He glances at my trumpet case and a book
of music paper I have with me."But my teacher wants me to write a new melody based on
the chords to 'Night and Day.He looks at my weak attempt."Oh, this is really nice," he says.His voice is high and pinched in the
throat, and my mind scrambles from one television cartoon character to
another, trying to place it.He is
most comfortable on the subject of music, about the lovely way Louis
Armstrong used scat singing to show that words were not needed to
communicate feelings, about how Miles Davis played many of the same
rhythms as Armstrong yet cast them in darker colors, and about Charlie
Parker's belief that great music is born when musicians forget their
long hours of study at the moment of creation."Sometimes it seems
to flow without any conscious effort.""Some people say you don't have to suffer to play music...."His eyebrows
begin leaping wildly, his mouth moves in silence, and his head shakes
side to side so much I begin to think he's stable now and the whole
room is moving behind him."That's a really difficult question.At the same time, sadness is a part
of everyone's life, and music can express the sadness people are feeling
and bring them together.You shouldn't hide from your feelings."Sometimes, I guess when I get paranoid, it can make me distracted,"
he continues.There are dozens of tubes of lip balm and hundreds of sheets
of handwritten music scattered about.He sits at his keyboard and stares
at a work in progress for trumpet and strings.The music moves slowly, by half
steps and subtle shades.He shows us the darkness
and confusion, and he makes beauty from it."That was so sad," I say.The twitching has almost
vanished."Wanna do 'Night and Day'?"Harrell, who was 90, had suffered for several years from colon cancer.Harrell spent much of his career keeping tabs on Stanford MBAs who graduated from 1961 to 1965.Srinivasan, the Ernest C.His 1993 study showed that women were soon earning less, getting fewer promotions and reporting less job satisfaction than men, although the two groups started out on relatively equal footing.He was very interested in improving the education here and very interested in the alumni and their careers."He is survived by two children: daughter Susan Abrahamson, who lives in Edina, Minn.Tom Harrell, who lives in New York City.In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations be sent to the American
Cancer Society and MidPeninsula Hospice Foundation in Menlo Park. |
