Trumpet Meditations – 16 Improvisations – MP3 Album

Description

Trumpet Meditations

16 Improvisations

by Eddie Lewis

Here’s a trumpet album that was a long time coming. It’s a project that Eddie meant to publish many years earlier, but life got in the way.

Trumpet Meditations is a collection of sixteen improvisations. We typically associate the word “improvisation” with jazz, but most of the improvisations on this album sound more like classical compositions. Indeed, Eddie Lewis is a composer of classical chamber music and he has composed a large number of unaccompanied trumpet solos and etudes. But these improvisations are only compositions in the sense that they have compositional structure.

The tracks on Trumpet Meditations are true improvisations. Nothing was planned. Nothing was thought out. Everything was completely spontaneous.

Eddie’s Improvisation History

Eddie Lewis has been improvising unaccompanied since he was a beginner. For his entire life, Eddie has enjoyed sitting in a remote location and playing whatever melodies enter his mind.

When Eddie lived in El Paso, he used to climb up into the Franklin Mountains, hang his feet over the side of a cliff, and improvise for an hour or two. People obviously heard him because stories of trumpet sounds coming off the mountain continued to be told in El Paso for decades.

Eddie has an active improviser even before he began composing. And just as with his compositions, where Eddie didn’t know that what he was doing was composing, he also didn’t know that his spontaneous music sessions were called “improvisation”. These were both musical activities that he did because he enjoyed them, long before he know that those activities had names.

Of course, later, as a jazz trumpet player, Eddie began learning how to improvise within a jazz setting. While most of the improvisations Eddie does are NOT jazz improvisations, the process of learning to improvise in jazz most certainly helped him hone his improvisation skills outside of the jazz idiom

Later, while Eddie was teaching advanced Jazz Improv at the High School for Performing and Visual Arts, Tim Hagans gave a masterclass. In this masterclass, Hagans gave the students an assignment, to improvise unaccompanied for thirty minutes per day. Eddie Lewis took the assignment seriously and began improvising as a regular part of his practice day.

Then comes YouTube. One of the biggest video series on Eddie Lewis’ YouTube channel is his free improvisation series. With over 100 videos in the series, you get to hear a lot of what Eddie does in his improvisations. This album, Trumpet Meditations, is the best sixteen of those improvisations.

The Tracks

There are sixteen tracks on the Trumpet Meditations album. The name of each track comes from whatever was on Mr. Lewis’ mind when he did the recordings.

1. Morning Prayer
2. When You Walk in the Forest
3. Peaceful and Still
4. Vanilla Flats
5. New Phoenix Wings
6. No AC Blues
7. Inkosana
8. Folk You Know, Folk You Don’t
9. Providence Prevails
10. Hope and Joy
11. Open Twice
12. Buddy Siscoe
13. Deliberate
14. Serious Life
15. Let Me Feed the Fig Tree
16. Finding Gratitude

Improvisation Playlist

If you enjoy the tracks on this album, then we encourage you to check out Eddie Lewis’ improvisation playlist. It features over 100 recordings of Eddie Lewis improvising, making up new “songs” without writing them out first. Here’s the link to that playlist:

Trumpet Improvisations by Eddie Lewis