It’s baseball season once again and it reminds me of one of my favorite analogies used in playing the trumpet:

As you watch your favorite baseball player in the batter’s box, what do you notice about the stance?  He will have his feet planted firmly on the ground and they are shoulder-width or slightly wider than shoulder-width apart.  As he is waiting for the pitch, he looks loose and relaxed, yet balanced and strong.  If he was off-balanced and/or had any amount of unnecessary tension, a hit (if he was able to swing the bat in time) would most likely not go very far.

While we don’t crouch down slightly when we’re playing the trumpet or transfer our energy exactly like a ball player, a stance with feet shoulder width apart and straight but relaxed posture will lead us to more ease in the physical playing of the instrument, thus realizing the potential for better tone quality, endurance, range, etc.

I personally witnessed an example of this when I was watching a friend’s combo play at a small dive bar/restaurant in NYC several years ago.  The trumpet player in the combo went up to the mic to solo and stood with all his weight on his right leg with his left foot perched on top of his right foot.  My friend (and great trumpet player), Bryan Davis, leaned over to me and whispered something to the effect that, “he’s going to miss some notes”.  Sure enough, the player cracked the first note he was trying to play.  It wasn’t all that high either, somewhere between a 4th space E or a top o’ the staff G.  His sound didn’t have much fullness to it and his tone thinned out more as his lines darted above the staff.  On the next tune, the player happened to stand with a more stable stance when he went to solo and once again Bryan leaned in.  This time he said that we were about to hear the player sound better.  Sure enough, the guy sounded a lot stronger:  he didn’t crack any notes, had a better tone in the upper register, and he seemed comfortable throwing in more  double-time licks.

I’ll leave you with a great anecdote by Maynard Ferguson from the July 1993 DownBeat Magazine article, “Wanna Play High Notes”:  “Miles Davis once asked me what he was doing wrong in the upper register.  “Your legs,” I told him.”

Thanks for reading!