Six Great Trumpet Embouchures - And What They Actually Prove

Pick six trumpet legends and you get six different faces. None of them is a template to imitate, and the reasons turn out to be more complicated than most players assume.

• Jerome Callet published the most specific embouchure instructions in the field: teeth almost closed, jaw pushed forward, lips curled inward, tongue tip pressed to the lower lip, and a tight "spit buzz." Yet slow-motion study of his recordings points to an ordinary medium high setup that barely resembles what he wrote down.
• A confession from Michael: as a lead player, he stumbled onto the inward lip roll on his own, long before anyone told him it had a name. It held up through three-hour gigs and kept his range at three octaves, which is also a reminder that one trick can work for the players it suits and still be a bad rule for everyone.
• Adolph Herseth's face was essentially rebuilt while he worked. In 1952, four years into what became a 53-year stretch as principal of the Chicago Symphony, he was in a car accident: fifteen stitches in his lip and several replacement teeth. He sat out, came back on a bigger mouthpiece, and was performing again within months.
• By Herseth's own telling of that return, he could not get past the F on the staff and felt uncertain, then once the concert got going everything was back to normal. The tone endured because it never depended on the embouchure alone.
• Doc Severinsen defies the classroom diagram. The rule traced to Farkas - two-thirds upper lip, centered, kept off the red line - simply does not fit him. He is documented among professionals who sit low, with noticeably more lower lip in the cup, company that also includes Freddie Hubbard and Dennis Brain.
• Maynard Ferguson kept changing hardware his whole career: a Rudy Muck 13C he sanded himself, then a custom Calicchio at .623", the Giardinelli MF1 at .590", Jack Bell FBL pieces, Holtons, Jet-Tones ranging from .593" to .656", the Schilke MF line, and Monettes at .636" toward the end. That spans sixty years with nearly a tenth of an inch of movement in both directions.
• Allen Vizzutti is the closest to the textbook picture, yet his setup still shifts. He plays medium high and downstream, with visible motion - the bell tilts a little down toward his left as he climbs. No book taught him that; it is simply what his anatomy does.
• Arturo Sandoval is where the evidence runs thin. There are thousands of hours of video and three volumes of his own studies, but almost no careful public account of how he actually sets up. What he wrote about covers articulation, flexibility, range and musicianship - not where his mouthpiece sits.

Resources Mentioned in the podcast:

* The Ultimate Warmup for Trumpet

* The Ultimate Technical Study for Trumpet

* The Ultimate Wedding Book for Trumpet

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