The Summer Life of a Trumpet Player

Allan Dean is Professor in the Practice of Trumpet at the Yale University School of Music and is currently performing with Summit Brass, St. Louis Brass and the Yale Brass Trio. In the early music field he was a founding member of Calliope: A Renaissance Band and the New York Cornet and Sacbut Ensemble. Dean was a member of the New York Brass Quintet for 18 years and freelanced in the New York City concert and recording field for over 20 years before joining the faculty of Indiana University in l982. Upon retirement of the New York Brass Quintet in 1984, Dean joined the St. Louis Brass. In 1989 he moved back to the Northeast to join the Yale faculty. At Yale, Dean coaches brass chamber music and directs the Yale Cornet and Sacbut Ensemble in addition to teaching trumpet. Dean performs and teaches each summer at the Mendez Brass Institute and the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. He is a frequent soloist with Keith Brion’s New Sousa Band. Dean has also appeared at the Spoleto and Casals festivals, the Banff Centre (Canada), the Orford Arts Centre (Canada), Musiki Blekinge (Sweden), the Curitiba Music Festival (Brazil) and the Morella Festival (Spain). He can be heard playing both modern trumpet and early brass on over 80 recordings on most major labels including RCA, Columbia, Nonesuch, Summit and others. On early instruments he has recorded with Calliope, The New York Cornets and Sacbuts, the Waverly Consort, the Ensemble for Early Music and the Smithsonian Chamber Players. Dean joined the Yale faculty in 1988. He lives in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts with his wife, Julie Shapiro, an artist, and his daughter, Eloisa. He is an avid tennis player and practices hatha yoga daily.

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Trumpet (and maybe trombone) players lead a slightly different summer life of festival hopping than do string, woodwind and French horn players. I thought for my first blog entry I might describe my summer which might possibly be of some interest to our readers. Along with the various festivals and personal travels described below I’ll also be playing some ragtime with Kenneth Cooper in New York City, a little jazz at the Monterey General Store on August 18th and if you are still in the area, Calliope: A Renaissance Band will be playing at the New Marlborough meeting house on September 12th. In this group I play various early winds including the cornetto, recorders and the shawm among other things.

After a quiet and very wet June in Monterey, Massachusetts where we live, I started my travels with the New Sousa Band led by Keith Brion who was the Yale Band director a number of years ago. Usually no more than once or twice a year, Keith gathers a 36 piece band of players from all over the country to replicate a John Philip Sousa band concert from the 1920’s. The players are from the various military bands (retired and active). There are also many university professors and a number of symphony players involved. The pay is terrible since the group is so large, so most of us do it because we love the music and the sound Keith gets from the group.

The first week of July we met in Columbus, Ohio to rehearse and play a couple of concerts at Ohio State and then moved on to Cincinnati to perform at the WASBE convention. WASBE is an organization of international band people and it is a prestigious honor to be asked to play at their convention. Keith does a very authentic concert patterned after Sousa’s programs but most importantly he tries to get a sound from the band that he feels is close to the original Sousa Band sound. In our section we play cornets, of course, and seldom if ever, play louder than a mezzo forte. The whole band gets a very mellow sound, quite different from the modern college or military band. The next performance will be at the MidWest Band Clinic in Chicago in December, another big event in the band world.

Then back to Norfolk for the first week of the festival. We have a wonderful brass group from Northwestern University, the Obsidian Brass, as our fellowship quintet this summer. Many of you have heard them already I’m sure. The first week this fine young group put together the difficult Street Songs by Michael Tilson Thomas. Although not my favorite piece in the brass quintet literature(!) it is a challenging 15 minute work in one movement that these players put together in four very intense days. They work wonderfully together and gave a very polished performance of the piece. They have been worked as a quintet for the past two years at Northwestern and will basically be together this next year as well. This is a very accomplished brass quintet and I look forward to working with them again in the last couple weeks of the festival.

On to Denver, where I spent a week at the Mendez Brass Institute. This is held at the University of Denver annually for one week. The festival is centered around a large professional brass ensemble, Summit Brass. I was a founding member of this group when we started 24 years ago, originally located at the Keystone Resort in Colorado.

We take our name from Summit County in the Rockies where Keystone is situated. Eventually we were priced out of Keystone and the Institute has been held at Arizona State University, then the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, followed by a few years at the University of Colorado in Boulder and now the University of Denver. Summit Brass is a large brass ensemble of 4 trumpets, 4 horns, 4 trombones, euphonium, 2 tubas and percussion. We did tour one week a year for the first few years, but it became financially impossible due to the size of the ensemble and scheduling problems of the players. It is a fantastic bunch of players, and even though we don’t have the greatest literature to play, it is always great fun for at least one week! Again, the players come from various symphony orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Utah Symphony, the National Symphony in Washington DC and the Munich Opera, plus many university professors from such schools as Indiana University, North Texas and Yale, of course! We all give master classes, coach brass ensembles, small and large, have open rehearsals of the Summit Brass leading to a big final concert on the last night. This year we premiered a new piece by the important New York composer, David Sampson. This was a 20 minute work, incredibly difficult, but a strong piece, I think.

We had 160 hand picked participants; college age, grad students and many adult players, many of whom are teachers and/or excellent amateurs. The Institute is now named after Raphael Mendez, the legendary Los Angeles studio player and trumpet soloist. Raphael used to play solos and then frequently played trios with his twin sons, Robert and Raphael, Jr. His sons went on to become famous doctors in LA, “surgeons to the stars” as they are known. They have been very supportive of the festival and in naming it after Raphael Mendez, we all hope to keep his memory and legacy alive. He is an important figure in brass history. Personally I took a few lessons with Mendez in the 50’s when I was growing up in Iowa. He would come through the area playing solos with high school and college bands and he would always hear me play for a few minutes. He would tell me to play “brighter” and use more vibrato! I wanted to talk about tonguing because Mendez had the fastest and cleanest articulation on the trumpet that I have ever heard. He always said, “Forget about it, you’ll never tongue as fast as me because I speak Spanish!!”

After Denver, my family fortuitously had scheduled a reunion nearby in Estes Park, Colorado. There is a big California contingent of Deans, a Midwest group and two of us on the East Coast, so Colorado has been a convenient meeting place. Almost everyone in the family plays an instrument but my nephew, Kevin Dean and I are the only ones to venture into music professionally. Kevin is a wonderful jazz trumpeter and is the senior member of the jazz department at McGill University in Montreal. He plays jazz the way I would like to play! Hopefully you can see us playing for the relatives in a rather dark cottage at Estes Park where the family would gather in the evenings. After the reunion my family and I, along with Kevin’s family, took a 4 day driving trip to western Colorado, Arches National Park in Utah, Mesa Verde National Park and worked our way back to Denver. Our various stops always included a pool as you can see from a candid photo of my daughter Eloisa and me!

Now back to Norfolk to work with the Obsidian Brass. They are starting this week on Morning Music by the above mentioned composer, David Sampson. I think this is the most important new piece in the brass quintet literature in the last 25 years. I’m loaning the trumpeters, Nina and Kyle flugelhorns called for in the opening of the piece. The flugel is just an overblown trumpet with a very large bell which gives the instrument a warm, beautiful sound.

The following week I’ll be back to play a work by Hindemith with a very unusual instrumental combination of violin, string bass, clarinet, trumpet and piano. I performed the piece many years ago in New York with the New York Philomusica but have not done it since. Unfortunately I don’t know anything about the piece or why it was written for this combination of instruments. Hopefully I’ll find out more in the next few days and I’ll come back on the blog with new and exciting information about Hindemith’s Drei Stücke!