Randy Brecker

On Tuesday, I got a chance to meet and work with one of my musical heroes, trumpet artist Randy Brecker - he came to town with the UNO Jazz Ensemble to perform a concert at Southeast - he also performed with the LSE Jazz Band which I direct. Randy is a multiple Grammy Award winner, and was one of the players I tried to emulate when I was a student in high school. He and his brother Michael had a jazz/rock band called the Brecker Brothers back in the late 1970s that recorded a number of hit albums - I put together a band with some of my friends that tried to learn and perform tunes from those albums.

In addition to his jazz performances with many of the great players of the last 40 years (Jaco Pastorius, Dave Sanborn, Horace Silver, Larry Coryell, and many, many others), Randy has also performed and recorded with pop and rock artists as diverse as Steely Dan, Frank Sinatra, Chaka Khan, Frank Zappa, George Benson, Bruce Springsteen, Parliament-Funkadelics, and James Taylor.

A pic of Randy and me after the concert - in the process of autographing the CD he was giving me:

Here is some video of his performance with my students - Randy's solo starts at about 4:30 into the recording (btw, the first trumpet soloist is my son Tommy). The piece the kids are playing is an original composition called Southeast Six Step - commissioned specifically for the LSE Jazz Ensemble I, and written by Eric Richards.

At Nicol's request, I dug up an old photo from another time I got to work with a Grammy Award winner - who happened to be a former student. I'm the trumpet player on the left of the row of four horn players - right next to us is my former student James Valentine, now a member of Maroon 5. That was a pretty fun night.