Jamie moved to Charlotte in 2009 to keep working for the Salvation Army, and brought the Brass Specatcular with him. I haven’t be able to go since that first concert until now, I’m sure it’ll be a blast. The trombone section will be killer, with both Herb Bruce and Eric Alexander in it, my old collegues from Sprititual to the ‘Bone.

Bill Pearce, pioneering radio broadcaster and founder of the Nightsounds radio program died February 23, 2010 from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was 83.
Bill was a fantastic trombone player, and influenced a whole generation of players with his smooth and unique style of playing. I got to spend a day with him in his studio in Rockford, Illinois, about ten years ago, and I’ve never met such a humble, gracious and truly Christian person before or since. He remains one of my big heros, both as a player and as a person. There’s a very nice tribute to Bill on Doug Yeo’s home page:

http://www.yeodoug.com/pearce_tribute.html

We just finished the Houston Grand Opera season with Tjaikovskij’s Queen of Spades. There are some very nice moments, but I have to admit it’s not one of my favorite operas. It’s long, over three and a half hours, and the trombones hardly play at all in the first two acts, so when the action finally starts in the third act, it’s way past my bedtime!

We have another weekend of Leonard Bernstein’s “Fancy Free”, written in 1944 when he was 26. It’s about three sailors in New York, so I guess it has something to do with “On the town”. It’s really fun to play, lots to do in the brass, with little jazz solos here and there. I even get to use a solo-tone mute and do my Tommy Dorsey-imitation, complete with slide-vibrato!

For you Swedish-speakers and -readers, I got a very nice review of my album on DIG jazz, a great web-site devoted exclusively to jazz. Here’s the link: http://www.digjazz.se/Diggat.html#Hulten

We’re starting rehearsing Tjaikovskij’s Pique Dame at the opera in a couple of weeks, and I aslo have a show coming up with Marvin Hamlisch and Joel Grey, should be fun.

Kepp swinging!

“Houston Grand Opera’s new production of Tosca, custom tailored to the company by director John Caird and set and costume designer Bunny Christie, is an absolute triumph. The magnetism of the opera itself, with three of Puccini’s greatest characters sketched in page after page of his strongest music, is allowed to speak for itself. Orchestra, chorus and soloists are united by the incisive baton of Patrick Summers, and the result is a non-stop ride of staggering intensity. To put it briefly, this is how Tosca should be done.” (Concerto.net)

“From the first chords that explode from the orchestra, maestro Patrick Summers just about propelling himself out of the pit with them, a gripping sense of urgency drives Houston Grand Opera’s potent new production of Puccini’s Tosca, which opened Friday at Wortham Center.

Under John Caird’s astute direction, just about every aspect of this Tosca sustains that dramatic intensity — most particularly, a superlative trio of star performances.” (Houston Chronicle)

Pretty nice!

We had Brent Phillips, trombone professor at Baylor University in Baylor, and former soloist with the US Marine Band “President’s Own”, come and do a clinic and a concert at University of Houston yesterday.
This guy is absolutely amazing. He is very detailed, organized and analytical in his approach in how to learn to play the horn, yet one of the most musical players you can hear. Check out his newest CD “Stepping Stones for trombone”, especially aimed at younger players. Very impressive!

A couple of jazz things to check out this week: This Friday night January 29 I’m playing with trumpeter Ralph Stivison and a cooking rhythm section at the Cézanne jazz café on Montrose Boulvard, downbeat at 9 pm. Also this coming Sunday at Trinity Episcopal on Holman Street we’re doing jazz masses at 10.30 am and 12.30 pm with the Matt Lemmler group, Trinity have their annual jazz festival this weekend. Come by and get blessed!

Are you tired of hearing the same Muzak in every store you go into while you do your holiday gift shopping????  Well, allow me to offer a respite in your present collections.  Come by Cactus Music, located at 2110 Portsmouth Street Houston, TX 77098 (713) 526-9272 this Saturday, December 19th from 12:00pm to 1:00 pm and enjoy some live music while you shop.  Join me, Warren Sneed, Paul Chester, Thomas Helten, and Joel Fulgham at Cactus with refreshments provided by St. Armold’s Brewing Company. Pick up a copy of Slide Side! Hope to see you there!

Still, it’s a great piece of music, and lots of fun to play. And compared to Lohengrin, the Wagner opera we just finished, it clocks in at half the time, two hours instead of four!

I won’t spend all my time in the pit, though. This coming Saturday, December the 5th,  I’ll be playing with Ambient Brass and the Houston Choral Society for their Christmas show. I’m also playing Christmas concerts at the Grace Presbyterian Church and St Luke’s United Methodist Church. 

If you want to check out some cool jazz, come to River Oaks Baptist Church on December 13 at 6 pm, where we’ll play with Matt Lemmler’s sextet. Also, on December 19 we’ll have an in-store concert at Cactus Records at noon with my own group promoting Slide Side, my new CD. Hope to see you there!

If you think the concept of a four and a half-hour opera sounds a little scary, I promise you there’s a reason Richard Wagner is considered one of the greatest composers ever. Whether you’re in the audience or part of the production, you get mesmerized by the story and the music.

The first complete Wagner-opera I played was Tristan and Isolde with the Royal Opera in Stockholm, Sweden, last year. Everybody kept telling me it would be a great experience, but I wasn’t really looking forward to spending five hours in the pit, counting rests. How wrong I was! I was completely captivated, by the music, the story, the skill of the singers. That they can be heard over an 80-piece orchestra is beyond me!

Lohengrin is considered Wagner’s “Italian” opera, not because it’s particularly Italian in style, but probably because it’s full of melodies familiar even to the casual listener. Pretty much everybody would recognize the Bridal March from the third act (“Here comes the bride”), the Preludes to the both the first and third acts are also famous pieces.

For you trombone-geeks: My friend Terry the Repair Guy is building me an old Conn 88H Elkhart with a Kanstul CR Open Wrap-trigger. Hopefully I’ll get it next week, report to follow. It should be good!

More trombone-geek stuff: I had the opportunity to try a German Lätzsch 210 trombone for a couple of weeks. A very different animal, at least for me who’ve always played American horns. Beutifully made with a warm pleasant sound, but in the end I still prefer my old Conn.

UPDATE – Added Buy Links at bottom of post.

Now for the big event this fall, at least for me: “Slide Side”, my new jazz CD on the Tierra Studios label, is finally out and ready to buy and ship to a location near you!
I still have to see and hear the finished CD, I hope to get one later today, but listening to the master-copy I’m very happy with it. When Bob Linder and Glenn Wheeler from Tierra contacted me in July of 2008 to record a CD, they had a short wish-list for the project: new original music and getting the best musicians and sound available. Bob was pretty insistent (those of you who know him know what I mean!) that he wanted original music that was still listenable, not too “out there”, and not too long, 4-5 minutes for each tune. We also agreed we needed a few jazz-standards on there.
I was given pretty free hands, and decided to record the three standard tunes with my “brunch-trio”, trombone, guitar and bass. For most of the tunes we used a quintet of bone, sax and rhythm, I also did a couple with just rhythm-section. We added horns, percussion and strings on most of them, and I gotta say it came out even better than we hoped.
It sounds fantastic, the playing by some of the top Houston players is amazing and the music is great, really fun to listen to. Swedish tenor-players Eric Norstrom and Nils Sandstrom contributed one original each, thanks to both of you! Dan Kramlich wrote some exceptional string charts, and yours truly did the rest of the writing and arranging.

Check out the Tierra Studios web-site, www.tierrastudios.com, and copy this link to your browser to order the album from them, http://www.tierrastudios.com/2009/10/link-to-purchase-thomas-hultens-slide-side/

I will try to set something up on this site so you can order the album here, and it will also be available for downloading from iTunes.

More good news: we had break-in in our house back in January, and my three main horns were stolen, a Conn 6H, a Conn 8H and a Conn 88H-CL. Luckily I have a couple of back-ups, my old King 2B and an old silver-plated Conn 88H. This was right before we started recording, so it was a bit rough getting started. Thanks to the fine detectives at the Houston Police Department and my good friend Rick Reeves, who found the 88H-CL on eBay, I finally got all three of them back last week!

Buy Slide Side on iTunes

Buy a Slide Side CD with Pay Pal