Jazz Trumpet Licks

Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra were at the 2009 New Orleans Jazz Fest on Saturday the 25th of April. I was fortunate enough to get down to the Jazz Fest and hear the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra perform. They sounded absolutely great and the crowd really had a good time.

Wynton Marsalis had a really good line up of a trumpet section as well. Ryan Kisor, Marcus Printup, and Sean Jones all took awesome trumpet solos. I was really impressed. Unfortunately I didn’t get the idea to start recording some of their trumpet solos with my iPhone until the end of the concert. I should’ve brought my video camera, but I wasn’t thinking.

At the end of the show, Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra rhythm section did some G blues. It was a really simple solo, yet really swung, real authentic New Orleans style playing. I wish I could’ve recorded the whole trumpet solo, then I would’ve done a transcription.

Sorry this was removed. Feel free to listen to more of Wynton Marsalis below.

Here is a diminished pattern that you probably have heard a lot of Jazz musicians play in different variations. This diminished lick is very easy to learn and implement into your improvisation skills.

Here is a sound sample played on trumpet:

How to memorize this diminished pattern in 12 keys:

Since this is another diminished pattern, you’ll only need to worry about memorizing the lick in 3 keys depending on which note you start on. You can see that this is simply a diminished scale going down with a half step up between each note of the diminished scale.

If you look closely, every first and fourth note of each group of 4 notes is just part of the diminished scale. This diminished lick is easy to learn on trumpet because the fingerings lay really well in all the keys.

This is a pretty easy diminished lick to learn. I didn’t get this diminished pattern from Dizzy Gillespie, but I sure hear Dizzy play it a lot in his recordings. It is kind of a good lick to use during a pause or hold for a cadenza at the end of a tune.

Here is a sound sample played on trumpet:

How to memorize this diminished pattern in 12 keys:

Since this lick is a diminished pattern, you only need to learn it in three keys depending on which note you start on. The way I remember the pattern above is you’ll start a half step below the first note that will start the minor stacked thirds (this will be C, thinking in C diminished). After that you go up a 4th. Then you repeat the process going up in minor thirds as far as you would like to.

The second part of the pattern changes to a different diminished key. You don’t have to change keys if you don’t want to, but the example above goes up a whole step to D diminished. The pattern just goes down in minor thirds with a half step up between each of them. You can continue the pattern as far down as you would like to.