Pip Eastop – Hornplayer

Here is Gale Lawson, a wizard with horns (and also a halo, if you look carefully). The valves of my Phatterboy Eb Flugelhorn had been sticking and no amount of cleaning or drowning in valve oil seemed to free them up. Also, the main tuning slide and the first valve slide were too free-moving. The [...]

Here’s my son, Zak, playing trumpet, leading his quartet, “Blueshift”, at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, 1st May 2010. Their performance was part of the final round of the Yamaha Jazz Experience Competition. There were three age groups: 15 and under, 17 and under and 19 and under. Blueshift, won the 15-and-under section. Zak is 12 [...]

On May 20th there’s a concert at St. James’ Church, Piccadilly, London. It’s a live performance, or interpretation, of the album, “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis. I think it’s going to be a sextet, but what I DO know is that I’m going to be the one playing the trumpet and thus, to some [...]

I must admit to having got out of the habit of practising trumpet every day during the last few months. This is because I’ve had so much tricky and important horn stuff to play recently, which has taken up all my practise time. But this won’t do. I’m going to have to find a way [...]

This horn is quite heavy, and it’s going to take some time to get used to it – by which I mean many hours of practise. And this means stiff neck, shoulders, back-ache …PAIN.  I’m not all that keen on pain. I believe in “No pain = GAIN”. So I asked Andrew Taylor, of Taylor [...]

I found this, while looking through some old photographs.  I must have thought it worth keeping or I wouldn’t have written it down, or taken the photo. I’ve not seen the actual bit of paper since that day.  It’s an arpeggiated exercise for learning chordal patterns within F# Melodic Minor. It may seem a bit abstruse but [...]

How wonderful to know that those evil warmongering Republicans have been shown the door! Despite far too little sleep (I was watching the election results coming in during the night) I’m feeling euphoric. I feel like I did when Tony Blair got rid of the tories (this was before he became one himself). America has [...]

Here’s a lovely picture of my son, Zak, playing the PhatterBoy. Just how cool is that? And what’s more – it sounds as good as it looks. He’s a very good trumpet player.

These are clips from a recent live performance of improvised music at St. James’ Church, Piccadilly, 9th October, 2008. Gabbi Faja (piano) and myself (mixed brass instruments).  [Audio clip: view full post to listen][Audio clip: view full post to listen] In these two clips you can hear the new “PhatterBoy” Eb Flugelhorn. I’d only had [...]

Here’s a nice pic of my friend, Kenny Wheeler. He’s been very encouraging and helpful – and inspiring – and I bought a couple of trumpets and a BEAUTIFUL Kanstul flugelhorn from him. 

Here’s a picture of my amazing new toy. I’m not quite sure what I think it sounds like. But doesn’t it look absolutely amazing?! I’ve got three mouthpieces which work with it and they all sound very different to each other – they all work, though, so maybe I should keep them all going for [...]

Here’s something exciting! It’s not a conception or a birth but some siginificant moment halfway between the two. Today, the building of a new instrument began. It’s an Eb flugelhorn. A big fat flugelhorn sounding one fifth lower than a normal Bb one. It’s being built by Taylor Trumpets and it’s going to be based [...]

I’ve had another amazing lesson with Martin Shaw.  We spent quite a long time looking into what we have agreed to call “Ghost” tonguing. Having done a bit of work on it since the last lesson and got somewhere (though by no means anywhere near it yet) it’s now got a little clearer exactly what I have [...]

Before: I’ve been practising pretty regularly and, I feel, steadily improving but increasingly feeling myself to be in a musical vacuum. What I need now is fresh air, not my own stale stuff to breathe; so with that in mind I’ve arranged to have a lesson with Martin Shaw, who has been enthusiastically recommended by [...]

I’ve just spent a week in Antwerp, Belgium, playing Schubert’s 9th Symphony with the Flanders Filharmonic orchestra (KFOV) and stayed with an old friend and fine photographer, Miel Pieters, a fiddle player in the orchestra. Here’s are some pictures he took of me practising my Benge pocket trumpet. It’s perfect for travelling as it fits in [...]

After a long period of fairly intense study I’m now having something of a lull in the trumpet practise due to being busy every day recording from dawn to dusk at Abbey Road Studio One, the film score of Troy, playing the bigger, curlier thing in F. This does not mean total cessation, though. Far from [...]

Still practising! I’ve been working on John Coltrane’s essential standard, Giant Steps. It’s a real earbender, but I think I’ve found a way in – an initial way of taking the fear out of it. It’s a colour coded grid of the chord changes. Pretty self explanatory. It shows that the whole piece can be [...]

Long gap since the last post here. Still practising, though! Here’s an excersise I’m working on a bit now. The idea of it is to get me right into the feel, into the nitty-gritty, of the melodic minor by getting used to some awkward angular intervals contained within it. The melodic minor (up) or MinorMajor [...]

I spent a bit of time over at Jim Rattigan’s house yesterday. We did some rather basic work on 2-5-1 progressions. Exactly what I needed. Then we worked a bit on “All The Things You Are”. Here’s a lead sheet (please let me know if you find this link doesn’t work)

Valentin’s visit has made quite a difference. This morning I made an assault on Chet Baker’s amazing solo from “Bea’s Flat”. I spent an hour or so looping sections of it at half-speed and trying to capture every not and every nuance. It’s coming along quite well, I think – I’ve learned about 75% of [...]

Valentin Garvie came around this evening. He had phoned up to say he was in London for four days between a tour around Sweden and a pile of work with Ensemble Moderm in Germany, so I invited him around straight away. We played through a few blues pieces and one or two standards, all with [...]

I spent a while ripping some carefully chosen Aebersold tracks into MP3 files in my PC. I’ve done this so that I can open the tracks up in special software which enables me to slow all or part of the tracks down, loop them or transpose them, or do all those things. I’ve found it’s [...]

Right now I’m well stuck into some “turnaround” exercises. The one I’m currently chopping away at is one of the simplest from Aebersold’s book of turnarounds (Volume 16, Ex. 3). Basically, this is a four chord repeating sequence, for example F#M, A7, D7, G7, which needs transposing into all keys. It’s making me do what [...]

I was in Waterstones, Charing Cross Road, browsing the jazz books today when I discovered this quote from Keith Jarrett from “Jazztimes”, May 1999 “Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms!”   Amen.

Since reading that the best way forward is to learn solos from recordings, I’ve embarked on some study in that direction. The PC has turned out to be a great help. I ripped a Chet Baker track, “Bea’s Flat” (1953), into the PC and then opened it in a .wav file editor. The trumpet solo [...]

Practising, in Udine, Italy, the day after a London Brass concert. Gareth Small very kindly lent me his Bb trumpet for the morning – and I had remembered to take my trumpet mouthpiece with me. I did at least 90 minutes of really useful practice. Lodes of Modes and that Clifford Brown wholetone exercise. No [...]

I’m becoming a bit frustrated by not getting enough study time. We are on holiday and the kids need occupying, taking out, playing with etc. for many hours each day. On top of that I have get my horn chops working because I’ve a couple of hard gigs at the end of the week, in [...]

I wrote out all the chords from Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” and turned them all into a useful chordal study which goes through every key. Felt quite pleased with myself. It’s a bit of an ear bender, so learning to play it in every key might take some time. I’ve also extracted a useful exercise from [...]