At 61, Trumpeter Maynard Ferguson Is Happy on the Podium

Maynard Ferguson will be 62 years old in early May, but the thought of retirement never enters his mind. “Are you kidding?,” he asked last week from his home in Ojai. “I’m busier than I’ve ever been in my life.”

Any doubters in the audience can catch the jazz trumpet player’s still-sizzling high notes at Hamptons in Santa Ana tonight, when Ferguson appears with a hot new nine-piece band, a smaller edition of the recording ensemble that he calls Big Bop Nouveau.

Forty years after his stratospheric reading of “All the Things You Are” provoked a cease-and-desist lawsuit from the Jerome Kern estate, Ferguson still plays trumpet lines high enough to evoke responsive howls from any dogs within half a mile. His jazz chops are as good as ever and, after a brief flirtation with a small fusion group called High Voltage, he is once again leading a traditionally instrumented band.

“This group is definitely what feels right to me now,” he said. “I got a lot of pleasure out working with my fusion group, but after a while I found myself itching to do something again with more horns. But it never felt to me as though I was going back to something old by getting a big band together again. It felt as though I was going forward into something new.”

Ferguson is, of course, bucking a 30-year trend away from traditional big bands, yet he seems to be making some headway. Perhaps because of the group’s sparklingly contemporary charts, perhaps because so many of the players are in their 20s (or younger), perhaps because Ferguson himself is such a charismatic performer, Big Bop Nouveau has been attracting consistently young, vigorously enthusiastic audiences.

But Ferguson has always believed in the vitality of the large jazz ensemble. After working with Charlie Barnet and Jimmy Dorsey in the initial stages of his career, he became an international jazz star with the Stan Kenton organization in the early ‘50s. Various editions of his own big bands followed, from the Birdland Dream Band of the mid-50s to the highly successful pop groups featured on his recordings of “Gonna Fly Now” (from “Rocky”) and “MacArthur Park.”

Ferguson spent most of his early career touring almost constantly. In the late ‘60s, he moved to England for a few years but has been comfortably settled for the last 14 years in the Ojai Valley. Despite the stream of major names who their spent fledgling periods with him (Chick Corea, Chuck Mangione, Bob James, Don Ellis, Joe Zawinul and Peter Erskine are only a few), Ferguson himself has had only modest financial success. Unlike many other leaders, he chooses to play music because he likes it, rather than because he has a piece of it.

“Oh, yeah,” he laughed, “I make a lot of jokes about my incredible wealth. Like the one about Bill Conti, who wrote ‘Gonna Fly Now,’ building two extra bedrooms on his home and naming them ‘Maynard’s Rooms.’ Of course, the high school kids I play for tend to take the jokes at face value. But in jazz clubs, everybody just laughs along with me.”

As important as his spectacular, up-front trumpet soloing has been to the success of his bands, Ferguson believes his role as leader has been equally significant. “Band-leading is a special talent,” he said, “and it’s one that often goes unrecognized.

Most people, for example, think you should judge Woody Herman by how great he played the clarinet, and that’s totally false. You can be a great soloist and still be a terrible band leader.

“Putting good musicians together and getting them to make music, to click together--that’s what band leaders have to know how to do. We’ve all heard groups with a great drummer, a great bass player and a great piano player who just didn’t sound very good together. Woody, Stan Kenton, all the guys who made it had a special talent for finding great players who could work together.”

I like to think that’s one of the things I do well too.”

As evidence, Ferguson offers the current Big Bop Nouveau. Young, vigorous and full of vinegar (bass player Nathan Berg is only 17 years old, and the average age is in the low 20s), it’s a group as much in touch with rock and fusion as it is with swing and jazz.

“These guys can really play,” Ferguson said, “both as soloists and as an ensemble. And the nine-piece format I’m using is big enough to have plenty of power, and small enough to let everybody have some space to blow some solos.”

With his new Intima Records release (“Big Bop Nouveau”) doing well on the charts and a summer of European touring on the horizon, Ferguson sounded like a man who plans to be working at what he loves for a long, long time.

“I’m feeling great,” he said. “I hit the swimming pool every single day when I’m home, 100 laps minimum, all that exercise stuff to maintain the breath control.”

My playing’s right where I want it to be, I’m having a lot of fun, and this band I’ve got is so good that I think I’m going to stay with it for a while.

“I try to look at it this way: Do what feels good to you at the time that you do it. That’s what’s always worked for me.”

Maynard Ferguson plays tonight at 8 at Hamptons, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. Tickets: $22.50. Information: (714) 979-5511.