Trombone Philosophy
Albert Mangelsdorff Trio – Foreign Fun
From Trilogue - Live At The Berlin Jazz Days : Polygram [Buy]
I enjoy regular email correspondence with a group of knowledgeable gentlemen of unreliable proclivities , whose time is variously spent focused on music, tennis and cultivated idleness. Some of them are older than me.
This week’s conversation strayed towards the question of why there are few famous trombone-playing philosophers. The exchange that follows makes very little sense, but reads moderately well when accompanised by a pinch of salt and the music of Albert Mangelsdorff:
A: Cars were my passion before I discovered I could play music. I wanted to be a motor mechanic and my parents considered it socially unacceptable (“Those dirty fingernails, dear”). They prevented me from learning the instrument I first wanted to play – trombone. “It’s a joke instrument – something they have in circuses.”
B: The trombone was also the first instrument I wanted to play (at age 3. My cousin came to stay and brought her oboe, I decided that I needed an instrument too, and pianos were boring, we already had one of those in the house). My parents objected on grounds of noise, and lack of requisite arm-length. So 3 years later they naively let me learn the trumpet…
C: I would like to have been a pro tennis player (and, prompted by my learned correspondents: a trombone playing gigolo).
B: …I am slightly reassured (and slightly disturbed in equal measure) that we are all possibly trombone players manqués. Is our continuing back-and-forth interlocution some kind of Freudian sublimation of our desire for a well-oiled slide? And (by well-oiled extension) perhaps this is why there are no world-famous trombone philosphers.
Trombonists’ need to comprehend the absurdity of existence is already met symbolically in their choice of an unprofitable and visually clumsy instrument. Just as the original Cynics lived like dogs in the streets of ancient Athens: to show their utter indifference to convential manners.
Trombonists already carry the “slide-mans burden”, therefore further commentary from themselves is superfluous. (Sidebar: “le trombone” is the French word for paperclip).
A: That burden is possibly weighted further by knowledge that their most illustrious peers bore absurd names like Higginbotham, Teagarden, Knepper and Mangelsdorff. Or alternatively a realization that life’s success lay in locating ‘the right positions’.
Nowadays too little attention is paid to the great trombone-philosopher Brad Gowans who finessed the Kantian dilemma by inventing the ‘valide’ – a trombone combining slide and valves.
As can be readily observed, too much email traffic these days consists of mindless banter. It should be noted in passing that the other players on the 1976 Albert Mangelsdorff recording are Jaco Pastorius (b) and Alphonse Mouzon (d). And the photo credits are due (in order) to Phil Moore, Eliya and kansasexplorer3128.
