His Horn Chases the Blues : Music Brings a ‘State of Peace,’ Says Jazzman

There’s always been a tendency to romanticize the artist whose work is torn from a mass of personal misery or tinged with the glow of self-immolation. But there’s nothing exalted about the ordeal Tom Harrell goes through day after day.

Harrell, who will play Sunday in the Playboy Jazz Festival, is one of the jazz world’s top emerging trumpet players. He confirms that he been diagnosed a schizophrenic who, were it not for medication, would be spending his life in a mental institution.

Saxophonist Phil Woods, with whom Harrell worked before going out on his own, flat out calls him “the best musician I’ve encountered in 40 years of playing music,” and in his last few albums, “Stories,” “Sail Away” and especially his latest, “Form,” the 46-year-old Harrell seems to have moved both the trumpet and fluegelhorn incrementally further into an expressiveness they haven’t realized quite the same way before.

Harrell recalls Clifford Brown, Chet Baker, Blue Mitchell and Kenny Durham as big influences when he was growing up in Los Altos, and you can still hear them in his playing, as you can hear Freddy Hubbard’s opulent heat and Miles Davis’ melancholy deliberations. His ear is always alert for the musical possibilities within overlooked sources.

“Music can be a lot of things,” he says. “It can reflect what people are directly experiencing. It rethinks the industrialization of our lives. The subway in New York is a beautiful instrument. I listen to my refrigerator and try to figure the chords it generates, the higher and higher partials of its harmonic series. The first music was imitations of the sounds of nature--birds, thunder, rivers rushing. It’s based on the heartbeat. Music can be soothing, but it also expresses what drives us. John Cage has helped me feel the beauty of everyday life.”

Harrell’s comments on his life and music were delivered in a Hollywood hotel room earlier in the week, before he was to play at Catalina’s. If there’s an extraordinary subtlety of coloration in his playing--even in his hard-charging numbers--that he can play at all is miraculous. The depressive effect of his medication is obvious at a glance.

A tall, slender figure with black, slicked-back hair, Harrell resembles the prewar Jimmy Stewart of “The Philadelphia Story.” His eyes even contain a similar shy humor. But he moves with an exaggerated, penitential shuffle, head bent low, his arms draped at his sides.

He’s a thoughtful, articulate man nonetheless. He talked about his current musical evolution, and some of the experiment he has in mind.

“(Saxophonist) Joe Lovano has really extended my musical horizon.” (Harrell and Lovano work together in “Form.”) “Every time he plays he creates beautiful melodies and rich textures. He tells a beautiful story. I like to work in different contexts, from solo to orchestra. But I’d like to be open to play sometime without drums--that creates a whole new way of hearing--and also without chordal instruments like the piano and guitar. A pure melodic expression opens up new roads.”

Harrell was born in Urbana, Ill., the son of an industrial psychologist who brought the family west (Harrell has an older sister) when he was hired to teach at Stanford. Harrell picked up the trumpet at 8 (he also learned piano) and by the age of 13 he was gigging around the San Francisco area. After he earned a degree in musical composition from Stanford, he went out with the Stan Kenton band, and after he left the Woody Herman band he worked with the Latin-fusion ensemble Azteca, then the Horace Silver quintet. He first met Phil Woods when he joined Chuck Israel’s National Jazz Ensemble, and went out with the Woods’ combo in 1979 and stayed with it until the mid-’80s.

Harrell is generous in praise toward virtually every musician he’s ever known, and his general comments about music were aglow with purpose and definition, as when he said, “Jazz is definitely a statement about life and existence, and how to keep your dignity in the midst of difficulty, and how to celebrate life and feel joyful.”

When the conversation turned to his personal history, however, he became increasingly gloomy and uncertain. He recalls a happy childhood and high school career, but remembers an early incident of aural hallucination and an adolescent attempt at suicide.

“When I became a teen-ager I had problems with feelings of unreality and obsessive thoughts that were disturbing. I started drinking in high school. I guess I shouldn’t have done that. I had to drop out of college a couple of times. I felt socially inept. I was completely blocked in my composing. Could we take a short break, please?”

Harrell left the room for a few minutes, then came back and sat down. “When I made my half-way suicide attempt--I was gonna put a garden hose to the exhaust pipe of the car--my father recognized what was happening and recommended a good doctor. I came close to being put in a mental institution, but when I took Stelazine it made a big difference. I started to be able to compose again and have a social life.”

For long moments the only sound in the room was the scraping of his spoon inside a cup of yogurt, and the small, irritable whirring of the mini-bar freezer. He tried to warm up on both his trumpet and fluegelhorn, taking deep breaths, plunging through scales half-lost in air pockets, and then gasping from the effort.

It was time to pack up for Catalina’s, and it almost seemed as though he wouldn’t make it. “I’d better stop talking,” he said. “I always say the wrong thing.”

At the club, he conferred with his sidemen (Billy Childs, Tony Dumas and Peter Donald) for a few moments, then walked slowly onstage. Once he raised his horn to play “I’ll Remember April,” it was like watching the explosive start of a horse race surge down the track on a roll of hard-driving 16th notes. He charged up the piece with swift, tight, joyous assurance, and continued that way through two sets and an encore, his face florid with concentrated intensity.

“Music is a way for me to enter a state of peace,” he had said earlier. “It’s like a sanctuary, a way for us to be vehicles of a higher power.” After the gig, he had the glow of a man restored.