Trumpeting
The art of improvisation
If you want to get Noe Marmolejo going, just ask him to explain jazz.
His first answer is, of course, from the great trumpeter Louis Armstrong: “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.”
Then the teacher part of Marmolejo kicks in. And we’re off.
He begins with the “collision of two cultures, both stylized and idealized” that, for all the manifold ills of slavery, brought West African music crashing into a glorious mashup with European music.
“Imagine,” he says, “if the slave ships had gone in a different direction,” landing in India or China. “It makes for interesting conjectures.”
European music was for sitting and listening to — and often paying for. “African music was not that way at all. It was a different vibe,” he says: It was singing and dancing. It was communal, percussive, lively. “Those things collide in America — BOOM!”
Marmolejo is an active, performing jazz trumpeter, an associate professor of jazz and director of jazz studies at the University of Houston. Jazz is his life.
“If you want to describe jazz, you can’t omit the impact of the blues.
… (and) without improvisation, you don’t have jazz.” Noe Marmolejo, University of Houston director of jazz studies
But he’s keenly aware that he’s an advocate for jazz in a city and a state that isn’t so into jazz.
“Texas is blues, and we can’t lose sight of that root,” he says. And blues, as a forebear to jazz, is close enough. “If you want to describe jazz, you can’t omit the impact of the blues,” the Africanrootedmusic of hard times and heartbreak, he says.
In the hands of artists such as Jelly Roll Morton, Scott Joplin’s precise, syncopated ragtime of the early 20th century expanded and fractured into amusical form distinguished by its creativity and improvisation. “Without improvisation, you don’t have jazz,” Marmolejo says. Testing limits
Marmolejo himself didn’t always have jazz. He grew up in Alice, population 20,000, outside Corpus Christi, a small town of hardworking Mexican-rooted people where his father was principal of the elementary school and his mother was an English teacher.
It was a town where everybody was tough, even the principal, who supplemented his pay in summers by patching roads in the Texas sun.
But as poor and hard as Alice was, the schools had a remarkablemusic program, the equal of anything in the big Texas cities, Marmolejo says. He soaked it up.
His father died when he was in the eighth grade, and the men of the community took on the role of collective father, keeping him in line. Young Noe did the backbreaking jobs, too, including picking cotton and cutting sorghum.
But it was always going to bemusic.
After two years at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Marmolejo got his degree at SouthernMethodist University and went on to grad school at the University of Cincinnati.
After that, he taught in Spring Branch for a few years. “When I was teaching in public school, playing and performing kept me sane,” he says.
While he was working on a second master’s at UH— in conducting— he got an offer to teach there. He took the job and stayed in Houston.
Cameron Kubos, who’s in the home stretch of his doctorate, has studied withMarmolejo since his undergrad days. Now he isMarmolejo’s teaching assistant.
“I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” says Kubos, also a trumpeter. “I couldn’t ask for better.”
But studying with his mentor wasn’t fun, Kubos says. “Initially, he was incredibly difficult with me. There was very little positive.”
Marmolejo kept pushing. “Nothing was ever good enough,” Kubos says.
After several years, Kubos saw himself getting better, and the teacher responded better, too. Now, despite everything, Kubos can see the benefits of the tough treatment and understands thatMarmolejo has a knack for knowing who can really be pushed.
“It was the right thing,” Kubos says. “He knew I could take it.” Working musician
Marmolejo is pretty good at testing limits, including his own. At 64, he could claim 49 and nobody would card him.
He used to do a lot of rock climbing. Once, climbing Devil’s Tower inWyoming, about 600 feet up, he got hitby a lightning bolt that exited through his elbow.
Another time, he and a friend were hiking inWyoming up past the treeline in late June when they got caught in a snowstorm “of epic proportions,” he says. On their knees and stomachs, they crawled down to the treeline and pitched a tent in three feet of snow. It was 12 days before they could hike out.
“Wewere in survival mode, but there was something peaceful about it,” Marmolejo says.
And there was the time he and a buddy parachuted off a rock at Yosemite, even though they’d never used parachutes before. They lived.
He recounts these stories as if he were talking about a trip to H-E-B.
“Part of the game is controlling your fear,” Marmolejo says. He remembers being nervous during an honors recital at DelMar, the second student to perform. Four lines into the trumpet concerto, he said to himself, “Don’t be afraid anymore. You’ve just got to go and do it.”
ButMarmolejo also considers himself a strange kind of lucky. For one thing, he tends to run into people he admires. Once on a whim— back when the phone book meant something— he cold-called photographer Ansel Adams, who then invited him over for dinner. He has bumped into Clint Eastwood and Doris Day.
Around his neck he wears a chain laden with varous symbols: om, yinyang, a cairn, St. Theresa. All were gifts.
Marmolejo is still very much aworkingmusician. In addition to playing private parties and other events, he has a steady Sunday gig at Second Baptist. “Any instructors of any kind who are not practitioners lose a little of reality,” he says.
He also composes. Right now he’s noodling around with an ambitious idea for a jazz piece commemorating the formal opening of the new UH College of the Arts, which throws open its doors in August for the fall semester.
“He’s such a creative thinker about not just jazz, but allmusic across all genres,” says Andrew Davis, interim dean of the College of the Arts. “He’s one of the revered figures in jazz education.”
In addition, Davis says, Marmolejo has great ideas for programming, whether it’s a Tower of Power tribute or a program devoted to the Great American Songbook.
The performer gene is strong in theMarmolejo family. His daughter, McKenna, 19, just got her Actor’s Equity card and is headed to New York to seek her fortune. His 14-year-old son, Miles Armstrong (no pressure there, kid) is working on getting his Equity card, too.
But forMarmolejo, jazz improvisation— the freeing part of jazz— can’t exist without the discipline. One of his heroes, Louis Amstrong, was, he says, tomusic whatWilliam Faulkner or Joseph Conrad were to literature.
“The person you’re really trying to strike is the person who knows what you’re doing,” he says. “You have a moral obligation to project your passion.”
“Any instructors of any kind who are not practitioners lose a little of reality.” NoeMarmolejo, on why he keeps performing and composing