I’ve been thinking about who the most important people in my musical life have been.

I recently visited my home of Minnesota and spent some time with my high school trumpet teacher Brad Shermock. I began taking lessons with him during my junior year of high school. It was through him that I first learned about the UNT Jazz Program. He did his undergrad there in the late 80s and early 90s and played 2nd trumpet on the album The Translucent Two by the UNT Two O’Clock Lab band. He stressed trumpet fundamentals and we rarely (if ever) worked explicitly on playing in the jazz styles. Regardless, he made sure to warn me that UNT is an easy school to go to, but a hard school to stay at.

We hung out for about 4 hours, and I could’ve hung out for 4 more, but I was meeting some friends in St. Paul. Talking with him during my trips home usually encourages and re-energizes me about music. I’m ready for my sixth and final year at UNT, after which I’ll receive my Master’s in Jazz Composition.

So Brad is one mentor in my life, the second is Phil Holm. I think I’ll collect my thoughts and write about him soon.

Steely Dan is coming to the Nokia Theater in Grand Prairie on August 21, and (assuming the ticket price isn’t outrageous), I will be going. I took a look at who the band is for this tour, and it’s (of course) filled with heavy, heavy players.

A name I immediately recognized was Keith Carlock’s, whose band Rudder I’ve seen a few times. He’s incredibly energetic and is pretty influential among the young drumming crowd, even though he is still young himself.

I also recognized the names of trombonist Jim Pugh and saxophonist Walt Weiskopf. Jim visited UNT last fall for some master classes and the inaugural performance of the U-Tubes. Steve Wiest and I listened to some of Walt’s nonet music during composition lessons this past spring.

Steely Dan is one of those groups that I start appreciating way too late. Only in the past couple years have I really gotten into them, and I still haven’t seriously listened to either of the Donald Fagen albums, the Walter Becker album, or Steely Dan past Gaucho. Almost everything on the Citizen Steely Dan Boxset I’m at least slightly familiar with (if not deeply love). I need to step up my listening and get those albums on rotation.

I spent some time today helping Lauren Hendrix prepare for her Graduate Oral exam. This is basically where you go into a room with three professors and they ask you to tell them all about jazz. They will also expect you to have a fairly extensive knowledge of your concentration. As a bass player, Lauren has been cramming her brain full of jazz bass information.

She and I talked about how strange the gaps in our knowledge can be. For instance, at this very moment in time, I could tell you more about the first Miles Davis Quintet than the second. I know (hopefully) a lot about the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, but couldn’t tell you very much about the Mingus Big Band.

My trumpet teacher from my high school years, Brad Shermock, told me not to let people try and insult me for not having heard a record or not knowing the names of all the players. It is good to know these things, but everyone’s experience is different. Last fall in Dr. Murphy’s graduate jazz history course, we talked about the difficulty in establishing a true jazz canon. There are so many levels of “importance” that one can ascribe to any given figure. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are two artists that everyone, even people with even a cursory knowledge of jazz will deem important. Of course, if you were a stupid person that wants to argue just to argue, I suppose you could even dispute those two, but you’d be wrong. After them and a few others, it’s pretty much impossible to judge importance and relevance objectively.

I have been and will continue to slowly fill in these gaps, so that my knowledge of jazz will become more comprehensive. Specifically, I need to listen to more of the second Miles Davis Quintet and the offshoots from that group: Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. All of these guys are too important for me to continuing not knowing that much about them.