It’s an old saying among school band teachers (probably to convince kids to play the French horn) that you don’t need to be as good to get noticed on the French horn. Trumpet players are a dime a dozen, and so to stand out, you’ve got to be a star. But on the French horn, you just need to be competent.
This advice is most applicable, one hopes, for the classical world, where horn gigs are few and far between and chops are everything. With jazz and improvised music, good ideas, and not orchestration, should be what counts (so if there are hundreds of really interesting trumpet players, there should be room for hundreds of trumpet players). And yet all the buzz about Mark Taylor has sprung up because he plays the French horn.
On Circle Squared, the reason for that is somewhat clear. The horn has limitations. Like the trombone, it can get clumsy when it tries to run too quickly through high notes. Not that Taylor is a clumsy player – he’s not – but it’s hard not to notice the physically impossible, especially with pianist Myra Melford playing several handfuls of notes each second all over the keyboard. The instrument, its timbre and identity and all the connotations that go with it, is more what listeners hear than the notes being played.
The instrument also has its strengths, mainly an ability to produce gigantic sounds with almost tragic restraint. Taylor knows this, and his tone, when he indulges in it, is sweet and sad and all the things that the French horn can be. On tracks like “Broken” and the beginning of “Alexia’s Rescue (A Zamindar Groove),” he plays melodies that are soft and simple, but embedded with notes that are just flat of where we expect them, notes rich with personality.
When the group is moving along, though, something is missing. Brad Jones is solid as a rock on bass, and Matt Wilson knows where the groove is on drums, but their repetitions get tiring with Taylor and Melford clashing on and on above them. Melford is the kind of player who’s great in person but not as satisfying on record. In person, you can see her make use of the whole range of the piano, fighting with notes as if she were playing a high-speed game of Whack-a-Mole. On record, her sound is shiftless, and she seems to be straining to break out of the lengthy vamps that this band can get into. But when she plays softly, she begins to express herself with the piano rather than against it. Her intro to “Circle Squared” has a delicate romanticism that is well balanced by Taylor’s big-footed gentleness.
The French horn can be like a Rube Goldberg invention, all that air going in, shooting round all those tubes, and then coming out muffled. For athletic, nimble runs, it would seem to be an instrument fit only for masochists. Taylor still has some of that masochism in him, that need to show the trumpet players that he’s got chops, too, despite the handicap. But he also has something that the trumpet players don’t have, in the tone of his horn, and what it can do for a phrase. He should put more of his focus on that.
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