Look out for Alex ‘Al’ Gambrel – a young Peninsula jazz trumpeter who’s going places.
The Elgin Park Secondary Grade 12 student was named best Surrey senior trumpet player at February’s Envision Jazz Festival.
But he’s also already attracting attention further afield – including Vancouver’s jazz community – for the fat, rich trumpet tone, wide range, flow of improvisational ideas and ear for chord sequences (he also plays piano) that local audiences heard at the South End Summit school band concert at Coast Capital Playhouse earlier this year.
Highly respected Vancouver jazz trumpeter/pianist/arranger/educator/musicologist Alan Matheson, no less, already gave the 17-year-old the nod to sit in with his Vancouver Community College Jazz Orchestra at a recent noon-hour concert.
Further recognition has arrived with the news that Gambrel, who also has his own combo as well as playing in the Grade 12 band directed by Rob Leeder, is one of three successful high school candidates this year for a $2,000 Fraser MacPherson Scholarship, an award named for the late Vancouver saxophonist, and recognizing rising jazz talents.
An additional honour is being selected as one of “20 of the most outstanding young jazz players in Canada” for the Yamaha All-Star Band, which celebrates its 20th year at this year’s MusicFest Canada in Richmond (May 16-20) and will be featured May 20 at the Centre for Performing Arts in Vancouver.
But Gambrel is also that comparative rarity among true jazz improvisers, a player with the technical and reading chops to meet the challenges of his other gig – principal trumpet chair with the Surrey Youth Symphony. (His family’s classical music connection is well-established – his parents have long been involved with the White Rock Concerts subscription series, and dad Rick is current president of that organization).
Is a player like Gambrel born or made? The answer seems to be a bit of both, judging by an in-person chat with the unassuming, meditative young man, with his distinctive shock of wiry, unruly hair – who also reveals occasional flashes of a dry humour typical of jazz instrumentalists.
As he ponders each question carefully – his father, sitting on the sidelines, chimes in with prompts and corroborative details – it’s evident that talking about his music is outside of the younger Gambrel’s comfort zone.
He has been playing the trumpet for seven years, he said, apparently already secure in his choice of the instrument as early as the end of Grade 6, although he can’t remember now what originally inspired him.
“I always really liked the style of music,” he said. “I know my grandparents listened to jazz a lot.”
Rick Gambrel contributes that when his son was only two or three years old, the clock radio by his bedside was tuned to CBC Radio’s jazz programming because “he liked it.”
There’s a point, of course, where awareness of a form of music becomes a matter of more serious study.
Miles Davis was the first jazz trumpeter Gambrel ever listened to in this vein, he acknowledges, which led him to listen to other trumpet masters, such as Chet Baker and Dizzy Gillespie.
But he has ventured back even further in recorded jazz history, to the bravura trumpet master Harry James – particularly since being assigned James’ solos in the Elgin Park Grade 11 band’s version of the 1937 Benny Goodman chart Sing, Sing, Sing.
“Over the last couple of years I’ve listened to a lot of Harry James stuff. Benny (Goodman) himself realized what a wonderful player he was – nobody else could really play that style as well as him.”
And Gambrel said he realizes that “every trumpet player (of the past) has his place, although most young players want to sound exactly like Miles Davis used to sound.”
He’s also listened to a lot of Louis Armstrong he noted – and not just for his trumpet playing.
“I would kill to be able to sing like that,” he said. “I would kill just to be able to sing, for that matter.”
His immediate post-secondary ambitions are to study for a performance degree in trumpet at Capilano College – “and maybe piano, too, if I get good enough.”
But he’s definite – from a taste of playing at the Cellar Jazz Club – that he also wants to be part of the Vancouver jazz scene.
He gives credit to Matheson, with whom he studies at Vancouver Community College and UBC, for helping him develop structure for his solos.
His other teachers, Terry Kells and John Sykes have also been “really fantastic,” he said.
But Gambrel, who played in the band for recent school musical Seussical, is developing another valuable attribute for a career as a professional musician – the all-important instincts of a trouper.
Anyone viewing the YouTube video of the Elgin Park Grade 12 Jazz Band’s performance of Portrait of Louis Armstrong at the South End Summit might have trouble believing Gambrel was battling the flu at the time.
“He was deaf as a post that night,” Rick Gambrel.
“Thankfully, the bass was on my right side,” Gambrel said nonchalantly. “It’s really hard to play in tune with yourself when you can’t hear.”
