Let’s Hear It for High C-manship

A few weeks ago, at the suggestion of Mort Sahl, I went by Donte’s jazz club in North Hollywood to hear a big band led by a trumpet player named Paul Cacia.

Listening to a big band in Donte’s, with its low ceiling and its close walls, was always an ear-tingling and possibly ear-threatening experience. That night I had the feeling a decibel-counter would have exploded with a loud “Boing!”

There were six trumpets, plus Cacia, in front; five trombones, five saxes and enough percussionists to staff the Rose Parade. The band played a lot of Stan Kenton charts, which was Sahl’s special interest in the evening, because Kenton was Sahl’s mentor and closest friend for years, and Mort often appeared with the band.

Cacia, then very young, had played with the band. At Donte’s he took his group (several of them looked too young to remember Kenton) through Bob Graettinger’s arrangement of “Autumn in New York,” Johnny Richards’ on “All or Nothing at All” and several more charts by the men who helped Kenton create his unique and potent sound colorations and rhythmic intricacies.

In fact, Cacia produced an album in 1987 called “The Alumni Tribute to Stan Kenton” (Happy Hour label, available on LP and compact disc). A number of the alumni--Shorty Rogers, Lee Konitz, Jack Sheldon, vocalist June Christy among them, plus Sahl himself--intersperse the tunes with reminiscences of the man and the years on the road.

What struck me at Donte’s, as it has many times in recent years, was how high the trumpets play these days. In the years when I was locked in mortal combat with the cornet, high C was my personal Mt. Everest, to be reached only intermittently when I was fresh and had a strong breeze behind me.

What astonished me was that two of the six trumpet players behind Cacia were women, Louise Beringon and Anne King. Women have not often been brass players, at least not since the days of Ina Ray Hutton and Phil Spitalny and His All-Girl Orchestra. But Beringon and King are extraordinary players, helping the section generate high-level choirs of sound that were exhilarating to hear, and each taking fast and imaginative choruses.

Cacia himself uses high C as a base camp and climbs from there. A liner note says his range touches double F-sharp above double high-C. I can’t even think that high, let alone read it. I doubt I could play it on the piano.

At those heights the trumpet functions somewhat like a kazoo, or a siren: The three valves are only minimally helpful. Lip and breath control are all, and the miracle is that Cacia and the other trumpet players who operate in this tonal stratosphere keep the sounds under such good control.

The Canadian Maynard Ferguson is, I think, the patron saint of the high trumpeters, many of whom wear trusses when they play because the pressure on their innards is immense, and they are subject to blowouts (as well as blackouts) if not careful.

Harry James played high, although not, as I remember, quite that high, but he was equally well known for the super-rich beauty of his low notes. It is a trade-off; the small-bore mouthpiece that makes the very high notes possible takes some of the resonance away from the low notes. The high men do not sound as well at the bottom of their instruments.

One of these days a brass player will doubtless invent a mouthpiece with an instantly adjustable bore, like the aperture of a lens, or maybe a swiveling, three-in-one mouthpiece like the rotating lens mount on an old newsreel camera.

The late William Alonzo (Cat) Anderson, who played with the Ellington band for years, was the first of the awesome high men I heard. On a night in the ‘50s at one of the Chicago clubs, he came to the front of the band and played a high, soaring, wailing chorus that seemed to contain no individual notes at all but was only a kind of ribbon of thin, pure sound. And he never descended as far as high C.

At the end of the chorus he snapped the horn vertical, like a rifle at present arms, and looked at the crowd with a sly, triumphant grin as if to say, “Cut that if you can,” knowing that nobody could.

The cornet was never a high instrument; mellowness was its forte, and its masters, like the late, great Bobby Hackett, rarely ventured above high C and didn’t even spend much time near it. Gorgeous and lyrical embroideries on the chords were what Hackett did so memorably.

But the high trumpets engender a different kind of excitement and Cacia led his band, which he calls the New Age Jazz Orchestra, through another CD, also on Happy Hour, called “Quantum Leap.” It presents some stirring, hard-charging tunes, with disciplined ensembles and fine solo work, and also features Cacia’s vocalist-wife, Janine Cameo. She sustains the vigorous June Christy tradition with a voice quality that is her own.

The high-altitude virtuosi did as much as anyone to convince me I was struggling with the wrong musical device and for this they have the gratitude of my neighbors. I don’t do the clarinet any better, but it’s quieter.

Happy Hour Music is at 5206 Benito, Montclair, Calif. 91763.