Category Archives: Writings

Remembering Charles Brady

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A recent photo of Charles, courtesy of Doug Davis

There are a great many people who only know Charles Brady as the cornetist on the legendary 1961 recording of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat Suite with the composer conducting. Indeed, that recording alone was enough to secure his place among the pantheon of great trumpeters. Just 22 years old, what he accomplished was almost superhuman – blazing through those tricky Stravinskian rhythms while projecting such a clear, consistent, colorful, focused sound that has been the envy of every serious trumpet player who’s ever heard it.

There is a great story about this session at Thomas Stevens’ website (Stevens and Brady were college roommates):

“In an effort to clarify the cornet notation for what was intended at the time to be the definitive L’Histoire recording conducted by the composer, Stravinsky worked with Brady for over an hour in an one-on-one session during which time the maestro specified the articulations for the complete cornet part. Consequently, it would be fair to assert the recording, which was subsequently released in the CD format, does indeed represent the definitive performance of the cornet part…”

Charles went on to study with William Vacchiano at Juilliard (other Vacchiano students include Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis, Charles Schlueter, and Gerard Schwarz), worked with the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Pops with Arthur Fiedler, performed with conductors Bruno Walter and Aaron Copland, and served a six-year stint as principal trumpet of the National Symphony in Washington D.C. And then he moved his family back to Bakersfield, just a short distance from his birthplace in Delano, California. He spent thirty years performing with the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra, teaching middle school band during the day and giving private trumpet lessons every evening in his living room. That’s how I met him.

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It was a total honor and a joy to study with this man for nearly five years as an undergraduate trumpet major at CSU Bakersfield. Every week I’d show up at his door and he would greet me the same way: “Hey, trumpet player!” — with all the enthusiasm of a baseball coach welcoming his cleanup hitter back to the dugout. I’m sure I wasn’t the only student he met this way, but it was a hell of a welcome regardless. We worked through all of the routine methods: Schlossberg, Charlier, Arban, Brandt, transposition etudes, Bach violin sonatas; as well as the standard trumpet literature: Haydn, Hummel, Arutunian, Halsey Stevens, Vivaldi, Hindemith. Occasionally Charles would contract me to perform a 4th or 5th trumpet part with the Bakersfield Symphony, and so we’d work on Verdi’s Requiem or Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. The performance of the latter was, by the way, a life-changing experience for me; I was so awestruck being in the center of that glorious music that I could hardly play a note of it. The next week when I tried to explain to Charles what had happened, he just smiled and nodded. At some point it occurred to (stupid) me that Charles was just about the same age when he first performed with Stravinsky himself…

But some of our best lessons were the ones when I hardly played a note. Often we would just sit and talk there in his living room; I’d listen to stories about his performances with Stravinsky or his tours performing Quiet City with Aaron Copland. He told a hilarious story about a moment when Copland solicited his opinion of the solo trumpet part – he actually teased the composer that the opening sixteenth notes sounded to him like a “little stuttering Jewish boy!” Only Charles could pull off a gag like that without fear of offending. Ever the devout Christian, he always wore a cross around his neck, except when he would replace it with a Star of David, which he’d show proudly as he pronounced himself a “Friend of Israel!”

And he was indeed. One quarter my assignment was to compose a piece for solo trumpet with the title “The Seventh Trumpet.” Along with these instructions came a stack of photocopied religious tracts, esoteric numerology charts, and Biblical references. Another time he spent an hour lecturing me about the primacy of Hebraic religion in the music of Schoenberg (12-tone music as an allegory for the equivalence of the twelve tribes of Israel) and Stravinsky (from pagan rites to Noah’s flood). The message he was trying to get across to me was to know where you come from, in order to know the mark you will make. I was in the middle of a typical twenty-something existential-artistic crisis, and these words hit me like a ton of bricks. It was some of the most solid advice anyone ever gave me.

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Charles passed away last Tuesday. As I’ve been talking with people who knew him, studied with him, or performed with him, the one thing that’s coming through most clearly is that this is a person who really lived those words: know where you come from. My brother-in-law James Sproul, who also studied trumpet with Charles, wrote on his blog:

“He was one of the most settled people I knew about who he was and why he was here.”

Along the same lines, local musician and educator Susan Scaffidi wrote a wonderful article for the Bakersfield Californian with the title “Trumpeter was a great musician, an even better man.” It’s true. If you knew Charles, you know that his greatness as a musician wasn’t the most impressive thing about him. There were many dimensions to who Charles Brady was, and yet he was one of the most consistent, self-aware, confident, and humble people I have ever encountered. To be such an accomplished artist, and yet to leave behind a legacy that is overwhelmingly rooted in one’s greatness as a human being… I can’t think of a better example of a life well-lived.

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With Charles in 2001, after my undergraduate trumpet permissions.

The last time I played with Charles was a few years ago. We were, oddly enough, backing Pat Boone in the pit orchestra at a pro-Israel rally. I had no idea what the gig was until I showed up; Charles was tickled by the whole thing, and kept us all in stitches for the duration of the show.

I had just finished my MFA, and I gave Charles copies of a couple of CDs I had recently finished. He was, as always, abundantly curious and enthusiastic about the projects I was working on, and he promised to listen to them promptly. I’m certain that he did. It’s been a while, but I’m sure the last thing he said to me was “See you around, trumpet player!”

Charles has left behind hundreds, probably thousands of students and colleagues whose lives were touched so deeply by his influence. He will certainly be missed.

Transpersonal Suite

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The Transpersonal Suite is a series of compositions that I have been working on for several years. I have performed them with a number of different ensembles, but they have acquired a particular focus in recent performances by Tin/Bag, my longstanding duo with New York guitarist Mike Baggetta. During the more than five years I have been performing with Tin/Bag we have developed a musical rapport that has enabled the ongoing creation and performance of these very special compositions. The inspiration for these works may lie in the world of books and ideas, but the music itself is the product of years of exploration and dedication to the project of uncovering a very personal, intuitive, and compelling musical language for creative improvisation.

In these single-page compositions the compositional objective is to compress as much potential recombinatorial value into as few notes as possible, creating a melodic contour which can function as a theme in the traditional sense but can also be expanded systemically by the improvising performer. The individual pitch and rhythmic elements may be divided, reorganized, repeated, rerouted (via jumping repeat zones), reversed, condensed, aggregated to create distinct chords or harmonic centers, and/or otherwise elaborated upon. The outer simplicity of the composition is such that each performer may immediately and effectively grasp the basic materials, though the internal compositional logics will ultimately yield an array of possible connections.

Each of these compositions has been named in honor of a writer, philosopher, or spiritual thinker whose work has motivated the kind of intuitive and integrated processes that inform and enrich my aesthetic world: Sri Aurobindo, Abraham Maslow, Hazrat Inayat Khan, Osho, and Lama Anagarika Govinda. Within each composition I have embedded certain distinctive systemic relationships that embody some dimension of the philosophical world view of each writer.

The Transpersonal Suite (consisting of the first five compositions in this series) was recorded by Tin/Bag in New York City in January of 2010 with the support of a Subito grant from the American Composers Forum. That recording is scheduled to be released in late 2010.

The first composition from this series to be completed was “Aurobindo”. This composition was recorded by the Empty Cage Quartet in July, 2006 and released in 2007 on the CD Stratostrophic (Clean Feed Records CF103) – that recording is embedded below. It consists of flugelhorn, alto saxophone, and contrabass working from the written melodic material, with electronically processed percussion improvising on the rhythmic relationships:

Aurobindo by kristiner

“Maslow” is the next composition in the series. Embedded below is a video recording from a live performance by Tin/Bag in Boston during the Fall of 2007. The audio quality is not ideal, but it should provide an adequate representation of how these compositions work:



This performance begins with solo trumpet playing the theme, at first unadorned, then gradually expanding and improvising upon some of the repeated areas before the guitar enters with a chordal accompaniment based on pitch aggregations derived from the various melodic fragments. Both instruments then engage in a bit of free melodic counterpoint alternating with sustained tones and guitar harmonics. This opens up into a more improvisational middle section, which eventually settles back into the melodic material of the third and fourth staves. Trumpet then drops out as solo guitar meditates for a moment on the theme. When the trumpet re-enters, the pace slows dramatically, and we end by focusing on the last six written notes of the theme (G-Ab-F-G-G-F).

In this particular case the only decision that was agreed upon beforehand was that we would begin with a trumpet solo. Every other performance decision is made in the moment, with regard to the flow of the music and the information that is contained within the piece.

In 2009 I received a Subito Quick Advancement Grant from the Los Angeles/SF Bay Area chapters of the American Composers Forum to fund the recording of the full Transpersonal Suite with Tin/Bag at Systems Two studios in Brooklyn. I wrote about that session and the brief Northeast tour that preceded it in this post. Here is the audio from the master recording of “Maslow”, recorded on January 16, 2010:

Maslow by kristiner

Following are the remaining three compositions in the series in their order of completion: “Inayat Khan”, “Osho”, and “Govinda”. I would be happy to discuss these in the comments section below if anyone would like any further information.

Click on a thumbnail image to view the larger version: