I love to get a chance to play—and sing it . . .

This has been bouncing around the inside of my head—the relatively uncluttered area I hear most people use to hold a functioning brain—like the lyrics of a song you hate for sometime now, and I'm hoping that by putting it into actual words it will do what most of my thoughts do when I try to formalize them into a coherent bit of writing, and evaporate into nothingness. When I worked I would often have this problem. For hours, or days and far too many nights, I would have a thought or image hovering in my consciousness just in front of the stuff I really needed or wanted to think about. Back then these interloping thoughts were usually snatches of conversations some secret part of me wished to have with either faculty—especially department chairs—or upper management or both.

Granted the current recurring thought has nothing to do with most faculties' lack of awareness of how modern business must, by necessity, operate or how books are actually printed and distributed. ("Yes, I imagine that book would be perfect for your class. But it is published by a small monastery in Tibet that only has contact with the outside one day a week and demands unblemished, black goats for payment. I can assure you we won't be able to have it here next week for the first day of class.") Nor does have to do with being given two completely contradictory, mutually inoperable directives within the space of two sentences. ("Um, let me get this right. You want me to hire three more people, and lower my payroll by 15%. Are you even aware of what you are saying?" "I didn't say it would be easy.")

That is the most maddening thing about this current recurring thought. It has nothing to do with anything that actually matters. Not that upper management actually mattered all that much—you could usually distract them with something shiny and using a new 'power' phrase that would keep them occupied for a day or two. Something like 'making a lateral realignment of our sales growth' or 'drill down into the numbers to find the most advantagous cost/return ratio title.' It's total grip is based on the fact that it is of no importance to anything, anywhere.

It began a few weeks ago when iTunes cycled "But Not For You" done by Chet Baker into my evening's listening. What first struck me was that while he was a fairly decent trumpet player, he completely sucked as a singer. What made him think he could do it? What makes jazz trumpet players in general think they not only could, but should sing? Saxophone players by and large, don't usually break into a couple choruses of "Take Five" and clarinet players are a fairly vocally quiet bunch. Piano and guitar players will often sing, but those instruments are for accompaniment, and tend to make the singer sound better if played well, and not so bad if played poorly. But the trumpet is a solo instrument, it takes the song by the cajones and makes it a better thing or destroys it in the trying, and the other instruments can damn well wait their turn.

I don't know about W C Handy, but the list of famous trumpeters that also sing, or sang, that I can think of is quite long. There's Louis Armstrong, naturally, Louis Prima, Dizzy Gellespie sang at least in his early days, Hugh Masakela, Clark Terry, the aforementioned Chet Baker, and Doc Severnson to name a few. I have a gut feeling Wynton Marseilles breaks out into a couple of verses of some of those old tunes he seems to favor, but could very well be wrong. The only trumpet player I can think of that never seemed tempted to vocalize was Miles Davis. That, however, would have taken his music out of the abstract and made it something that would connect directly with the audience. Something I don't think he wanted or could accept. I once saw him do a long number during his fusion/free period standing in a rear corner of the stage facing the curtains. He was there for the music and the audience was just a sadly necessary, but unwanted distraction.

Anyway, I still don't know what there is about playing the trumpet that leads one to start singing at the first opportunity, and probably never will, but perhaps now that question will stop popping up at every moment.

Great. Now I have "Basketball Jones" echoing around up there.