The Lompoc Concert Association (LCA) welcomes traveling musicians of high caliber to perform in Lompoc every year. The opening concert for the association’s new season will feature a skilled soloist—trumpeter Brandon Ridenour—performing live at Lompoc’s First United Methodist Church on Oct. 14.
Ridenour is a New York-based soloist who graduated from the Julliard School of Music. He arranges almost all of his music himself, Ridenour told the Sun, because of his interest in great music, whether it was written for the trumpet or not.
“There’s a lot of piano music on the program, but adapted for trumpet,” Ridenour said. “We’ve got some Gershwin preludes, some Debussy preludes, some Ravel. I mainly want to play music by the greatest composers, but Gershwin and Debussy didn’t write trumpet solos, so my way around that is arranging them myself.”
Ridenour began his music education on the piano, he explained, when his father taught him to play at a young age.
When it came time to choose an instrument for band in school, he didn’t really get a choice, Ridenour said. He had his dad to thank for that again.
“The trumpet did choose me, I didn’t really choose it,” he said. “It was waiting for me in the basement because my dad had played it when he was in grade school.”
But where his dad found a voice on the piano, Ridenour found his voice with the trumpet. He gained quite the proficiency in classical music, specializing in it at Julliard. But he felt the inescapable pull of jazz, a style almost epitomized by the trumpet.
He became obsessed with players like Louie Armstrong and Miles Davis and their distinct voices, which are totally different even though they play the same instrument. The jazz influence comes through, he said, even on classical pieces, which he arranges to include an “extra spice.”
“These sounds and different styles of music are ever changing, and as a performer you are trying to best communicate that to the audience,” he said. “The more you can understand these pieces and understand yourself and be comfortable enough with your voice, the better you become at relating these ideas, these melodies, to your audiences.”
With his experience in piano, and his careful arrangements of these masterful pieces, Ridenour requires a seriously skilled accompanist. He’s bringing along pianist Yoonie Han for the concert.
Han is another Julliard graduate who plays Ridenour’s arrangements, which he said are very involved.
“She is a really great soloist and chamber musician on her own,” Ridenour said. “She’s plenty busy with her own life, I can’t believe she’s on the road with me.”
Ridenour also said he would bring along a piccolo trumpet and flugelhorn to the Lompoc Concert Association show. They give him choices in the kind of sound he can create, but it’s all his unique voice.
“I still think that the voice and the mind is stronger than the actual physical instrument you’re playing on,” he said. “Louie’s [Armstrong] voice, both his trumpet and vocal voice, was so strong that it didn’t matter what trumpet he was playing on, he was still going to have that vibrato and have that approach and sound.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne has a lot of love for Louie Armstrong. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 13-20, 2016.
