My Name
“Wait, but what do I play—” The piano sings a gentle chord progression. Bb Blues. I bring my trumpet to my face, but the foreign feeling of improvisation prevents me from playing. It’s a simple blues, and I know the scales, but nothing musical comes out of the horn. I recall the first time I picked up the trumpet, like a child hammering at the valves. My confidence decrescendos as I lose where I am in the 12 bar blues. My ability to play is compromised because I don’t have music to read.
The piano stops. Mr. Burn, gathering his clipboard, not bothering to exchange eye contact as he leaves the room whistles, “Congrats, you’re in!”
Unlike other musical ensembles, in jazz, without the guidelines of black lines and notes, I was rendered useless, staring into an abyss of blank space. If this is jazz, I’d made a huge mistake.
From a Korean family, I grew up abiding by traditional expectations: to serve others. To act in any way that best fit the ensemble, not stand out and relish the spotlight. As a result, my Asian culture became my black lines and notes, establishing the confines of my comfort zone, restricting what I could and couldn’t do.
Just as I feared, improvising wouldn’t come easily. I found myself thinking only how to play right: the right notes in the right scale, the right tempo, and the right phrasing to best serve the ensemble sound. Still haunted from my embarrassing audition, my brain shuts down as I succumb to the relentless tempo of the music. But as the solo ends, I find my way to the notes on the page. I weave back into the homogenous mixture of trumpet sounds, and my comfort alongside others blooms as I play the music on the page.
In jazz band, two conflicting elements are alive at once: I approach the articulations like the other trumpets in the band and blend with the ensemble to form a harmonious sound, but I also discover my own expression driven by my emotions, my style, and my character. That’s what jazz is about, embodying the musical maverick and resisting the rules defined by music theory.
It’s the San Mateo Jazz Festival, the day Mr. Burn selects me to perform the solo. As my eyes read the ink printed on the white paper, the repetitive black markings on the page become more than just pitches and specific durations. The black and white on the page blend into a rainbow of sound, adding on top of each other, creating a layer of harmonies that seamlessly transition from one to the next. My body and my fingers loosen. My heart follows the beat of the tempo. My head nods—as if in approval—with the subtle swing driving the rhythm of the music. I close my eyes and play to my own intuition.
In the end, I forget both the audience’s applause and the judges’ comments, because for a moment, I finally understand what it feels like to be myself. I lost myself in that solo, but it wasn’t the same feeling of being lost, like during the audition. I lost myself within the experience of simply creating. My solo escaped from the five lines embedded on the page and transcended into a profound, creative being—a reflection of myself.
My solo demonstrated a perfect articulation of interdependence. The uniformity of articulation, intonation, and balance throughout the ensemble forces us to become a unit, like a family. In my family, I step up as the figurehead when my father works multiple shifts a day. Being the firstborn, I become the expectation for my three siblings to follow. Where the lines between the individual and the ensemble are so blurred it’s difficult to know which to prioritize at a given moment, I’ve learned it simply comes down to intuition, just like a jazz solo.