jazz french horn

I’m listening to this album by Jim Rattigan, which I picked up at Ray’s Jazz a while ago. The idea of playing jazz on my chosen instrument been a small obsession of mine since, at an impressionable age, I was given an LP by the New York horn player, composer and leader Tom Varner. Until then, I’d had no idea that this was even possible, assuming instead that jazz was a party to which I was not invited, and envying the trombonists and trumpet players in the school big band. Even after this revelation, I was too timid to actually do very much until I went to college, where I attended a jazz course and far too few of Keith Tippett’s improvisation classes.

The French horn has never been a common instrument in jazz, mainly because its size and shape, which produce its characteristic rich timbre, mean that most playing is done further up the harmonic series than other brass instruments. As Tom Varner notes,

the French horn is so slippery. For the first two or three years, I had trouble trying to play a line which might be pretty easy to play on the trumpet or saxophone, but on the French horn it sounds like shit. It sort of takes extra to get that flexibility that you need on the horn, just because it’s so much bigger and the overtones are so close.

Nonetheless, there is a distinguished roster of jazz horn players, starting in the ‘fifties, when composers started to use the instrument to fill out the middle register of ensembles and big bands. The third-stream composer Gunther Schuller was one of three to play on The Birth of the Cool; Julius Watkins featured on later Miles/Gil Evans projects, as well as playing with Charles Mingus, Freddie Hubbard, John Coltrane (the Africa sessions), and the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra.

In the US, while Varner has earned most critical plaudits (including placings in several Downbeat critics’ polls), the field also includes the prolific Mark Taylor, Vincent Chancey and John Clark. I’m told by my uncle John Benson that Branford Marsalis paid tribute to Africa/Brass at the recent Chicago Jazz Fest with a ‘wonderful’ band including four horns. In the UK, as well as Rattigan, LPO principal Richard Bissill is a mean arranger and improviser, though one who seems to operate less in the jazz mainstream. (If memory serves, Rattigan contributes a solo to Bissill’s arrangement of ‘Caravan’ on the novelty horn-fest CD The London Horn Sound.) Pianist Gwilym Simcock also plays horn (see Acoustic Triangle’s latest, passim). British-born Martin Mayes has made a career in Italy, performing with Instabile Orchestra and Cecil Taylor as well as investigating the acoustic properties of the instrument in free-improv settings. (Cruelly, I press-ganged him into playing his first Mahler in years at Dartington when we were short two players for the Second Symphony.) Pip Eastop is also an improvising horn player, mainly in a free-improv sense, but interestingly seems to have turned to the trumpet in order to learn to play jazz.

Returning to Jim Rattigan’s Jazz French Horn, what I like about this disc is that Rattigan still sounds like a horn player; there’s that real, rounded warmth to his tone. Hear him cool as a cucumber on Steve Swallow’s ‘Eiderdown’, or cooking on ‘Black Narcissus’ (note the use of ‘hand-stopping’, or muting the sound by covering the bell with the hand). And he takes ‘Autumn Leaves’ on Wagner Tuba, which has to be a first.

Those interested in jazz french horn should consult Harlan Feinstein‘s impressive resource on the subject, and if there are any more players out there, it would be great to hear from you. The reason, finally, for this post is that I start the Jazz Workshop class at Morley College next week, finally scratching that itch. I’ll let you know how I get on.