Mail Tribune

Maynard Ferguson is a musician of many faces. Although he gained fame as a trumpeter capable of accuracy through an amazing range, he has mastered other instruments, been a band-leader, been a designer and manufacturer of musical instruments, worked as a producer, composer, arranger and film music producer.

Increasingly, he’s become a teacher, passing band music on to a new generation. So it’s fitting that when Ferguson visits Southern Oregon on Tuesday with his latest big band, Big Bop Nouveau, he’ll play at South Medford High School.

Ferguson will perform at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 31, in the auditorium at South Medford High School, 815 S. Oakdale Ave., Medford.

Tickets are $20, $10 for students, and are available by calling 842-3688.

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A workshop for brass and rhythm players will be held with Ferguson at 4 p.m. the same day. The workshop will be open to all ticket holders.

"It’s not what they hear on radio," the 77-year-old jazz great says in a telephone interview. "But when they become involved with jazz, they start to love it. And they know they’re a minority."

Allen Barber, director of bands at South, says everybody knows Ferguson is one of the greatest trumpet players of the 20th century.

"But he’s also one of the top educators," Barber says. "This is something these kids will never forget."

In Ferguson’s clinics the band plays a tune with several showy solos, and Ferguson tells students they can direct their questions to anybody on the stage.

Barber says the one to thank for Ferguson’s visit is trumpet player/bandleader Stan Mark of Medford, who was the key to getting Medford on Ferguson’s schedule as he tours the United States and Japan.

"He’s playing better than he ever did," says Mark, who played in Ferguson’s band for a decade and recently moved from Las Vegas to Medford.

On Wednesday, about 600 concert seats had been sold. The auditorium holds 900.

Ferguson has recorded more than 60 albums and had a hand in launching the careers of Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter and others. His roots are in big-band, but he has outlived that era, absorbing influences from jazz, rock, funk, disco and fusion.

He’s famous for his ability to reach the note "double-high C" and for a trill with a four-note range (most professional horn players have a three-note range). Pressed, he’ll admit he can still do it, although he’s not sure just how.

"Yeah, I don’t know," he says. "I don’t drink or take drugs. Wait! That might ruin my image."

Seriously, he says, it’s coordination: "Your whole body goes into it."

Ferguson comes from Montreal, Canada. Born in 1928, he played piano and violin by age 4 and performed as a soloist with the Canadian Broadcasting Company Orchestra at 11.

He remembers being moved by a coronet solo he heard at a church solo almost 70s years ago, at age 9.

At 15, he played with his brother’s dance orchestra along with pianist and jazz great Oscar Peterson. A year later he formed his own jazz and dance orchestra.

After his move to the United States in 1948 his trumpet became a hallmark of the Stan Kenton Orchestra in the early 1950s. Winning acclaim for his technique and breathtaking high notes, he regularly occupied a lead position in Down Beat polls as the top jazz trumpeter.

In 1954 he went to Hollywood to work in movies. That’s his trumpet in "The Ten Commandments." In 1956 he formed the first of his 13-member big bands. The band was characterized by his signature coordination of the brass section.

By the ‘60s big bands were dead, victims of the high cost of touring and changing tastes. Ferguson didn’t dissolve his until 1967.

After a late-’60s stay in India — the experience affected him deeply and can still show up in his music — he moved to Manchester, England, where he headed a horn manufacturing business and arranged pop and rock songs for his new big band, his first one that used electric instruments. He developed some unique instruments, including a left-handed trumpet and a trombone with valves called the "Superbone."

In the 1970s he was back on the pop charts with the album "Conquistador" and the 1978 mega-hit "Gonna Fly Now" (from the boxing movie "Rocky"), the first jazz number to top the pop charts since the big band era.

He founded the Big Bop Noveau Band about 15 years ago. It’s jazzy, a return to Ferguson’s roots. The band avoids the use of synthetic sounds and endeavors to play straight-forward jazz and be-bop style.

He feels "pretty good" about the big band revival of recent years because, "a lot of it has to do with jazz educators."

And he doesn’t think about retiring.

"I’m still on the road," he says. "I enjoy the music and the camaraderie."

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com.