He was a bad mother. Maybe that’s part of the reason I texted him every year on Mother’s Day. “Happy Mother’s Day, Carl” I’d write, to which he would reliably reply “Happy Mother Fucker’s Day, you mother! 💉💊🍸” Carl’s dead now. This is a story about Carl.

I met Carl over the summer of 2009. I was moving to Los Angeles later that year to pursue a graduate degree in music and was visiting town for a week to find an apartment. While in the area, a friend of mine invited me to a few gigs and rehearsals around town to meet some of the cats. One of those events was a big band rehearsal held at the Boys and Girls Club in Pasadena, which my girlfriend at the time and I attended.

The group featured your typical big band lineup (four trumpets, four trombones, five saxes, piano, bass, and drums) and was made up of players of varying caliber. There were day-jobbing hobbyists excited to keep up (I’ve known lots of jazz-loving lawyers and pilots), some heavy hitting old timers who were once heroes of the industry, plus a handful of modern ringers like Carl, who was the lead trumpeter for the band.

I had known about Carl for some time before meeting him. In high school, my trumpet tutor gave me an album of Carl’s titled Be Bop Big Band. At the time, Carl’s playing seemed unfathomable to me. A few years later, in college, I became enamored with the writer Bill Holman and his big band which Carl had been the lead player for since the 70s. I never considered I’d one day meet him--let alone play with him so frequently--and to finally hear him in person was something else.

When I moved to LA that fall, I became a regular sub with the band in Pasadena, which is how Carl and I got to know one another. Over time, we became friends and section mates in many of the jazz bands around town (I even held a chair in Bill Holman’s big band for maybe six years or so), and I would often sit to Carl’s left as his second chair player.

While Carl was a fantastic lead player--and he really was, but that's another story--it was as a soloist where he was truly something else. He improvised long, flowing melodies carved out by a dizzying technique and the kind of musical fluency most people can hardly dream of. Carl once told me that after going head to head with one of the most famous trumpeters in the world (who shall remain nameless), he (the famous one) drove Carl back to his hotel and apparently gave him a piece of his mind. “You made a fool out of me up there.” However, despite Carl’s remarkable playing, he seemed perfectly content to sit with the rest of us in the back row, never seeming to put the idea of fame or the limelight in front of the music he loved.

Knowing someone like that, a player of such high caliber, it’s hard not to want to pick their brain--to learn the secret of how they came to play so fucking astoundingly, and one night, late after a gig while hanging at Carl’s pad, he explained to me how he had developed his musical concept at an early age. His uncle, a prominent saxophonist in the 1950s, led a well-known west coast jazz group featuring a trumpeter named Don Fagerquist. As a youngster, Carl would sit on the floor in front of his mother’s record speakers and soak up Fagerquist’s smooth, lyrical playing, which he likened to the sound of a babbling brook. Having been so heavily influenced by Fagerquist’s sound, it was then just a matter of getting that musical voice through his own instrument--a process that seemed to be perfectly natural for Carl.

“Don’t practice.” he once told me. “Play.” And that was his genuine approach. He let the music find its way through him by taking every opportunity to improvise and play with jazz ensembles wherever he happened to be. And after a veritable lifetime committed to jazz, the results were extraordinary.

It was because of Carl’s incredible playing that the Bach corporation reached out to him. They hoped he would trade in his old Benge to play and endorse a new line of commercial trumpets they had produced. Carl told me this at rehearsal one morning and invited me over to his place that afternoon to try the horns and fuck around and get a little stoned. So, after the session wrapped up, we bopped on over to his place in Valley Village and met with the rep.

We set up some chairs in the middle of Carl’s living area and lined a few cases against the wall, all open and with shiny new trumpets inside beaming with potential. The rep--whom I don’t remember too much about, other than him being a bassoon player of all things as well as your typical smiling sales guy--was going on about bore sizes and bell tapers and sound profiles, how responsive and brilliant the horns were, all the typical selling points most people that can hang tend to care very little about--particularly Carl. He just wanted to play the damned things. And did he ever.

Carl stretched out on each horn, screaming high notes, belting low notes, displaying his technical virtuosity playing classic bebop heads from the 1930s and 40s. (He played an uptempo version of Tico Tico acapella that was one of the most astonishing things I have ever seen or heard.) I had sat next to this guy for years, but something about that afternoon had me listening to Carl as if for the first time. Because here’s the thing.

As a professional musician, you’re constantly surrounded by talent. And often, that talent is experienced. Years and years spent refining your craft is the cost of entry, and even sitting next to someone like Carl, you can start to take it for granted.

You learn a player’s voice and their devices (or, as Carl once put it, how we’re all “bound by our licks”). You bear witness to their humanness, the nights the chops won’t cooperate, when it’s just plain old work. But through that you also develop the capacity to, perhaps, hear them in ways others cannot. You find new appreciation of the indescribable when it flows through them and captivates you even after the hundreth solo.

That afternoon I heard with fresh ears how remarkable Carl was. There was no band, no other horns blending into the sound, no drumset marking time… Just a man, a master, in his home, opening up.

We hung for a few hours going back and forth, talking, laughing, trying horns, fucking around with mouthpieces and wearing out the sales rep. I found my favorite horn of the lot, a smaller bore instrument I felt well-suited to and sounded the best on. The rep had some things to say about that, how the larger bore models should have given me the larger sound and whatnot, a line of technical commentary Carl quickly shot down by stating the facts as he saw them.

“There’s one thing you don’t know about trumpets,” he told the rep.

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“What it’s like to play them.”

I’m glad I knew you, Carl. You knew better than most what it was like to play them. Happy Mother Fucker’s Day 💉💊🍸🎺

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