Volume 2, Issue 1  May, 2000

 Center Stage with

                                                         Marvin Stamm     

This interview took place during a lunch break at the International Trumpet Guild Conference last May. Marvin's schedule at the conferences is "wall to wall". He is usually the guy with the crowd of people around him. Our talk was no exception as anyone who spied him with, seemingly, a spare moment on his hands would beeline their way over to gain an audience with him.                                                                            For anyone not familiar with Marvin's legacy, the phrase, "has played with everyone" may have been coined for him. A partial list includes: Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Burt Bacharach, Dionne Warwick, Paul McCartney, (the solo in "Uncle Albert") Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Barbara Streisand, Paul Simon, Thad Jones / Mel Lewis, Frank Sinatra, Quincy Jones, Stanley Turrentine, Gary McFarland, Freddie Hubbard...need we go on?

Meeting Marvin Stamm is a breath of fresh air. The man simply wreaks a healthy aura. Trim, fit, not a hair out of place, Marvin is a great place to let your eye settle during those long, seemingly endless hours at trade shows and conferences. His incredibly busy schedule puts him on the road a good seven months of the year. Yet, he gives the impression of someone obviously from the "Merlin" school of being...the wisdom of an old soul in a body that's getting younger as the years go by.    

How does Marvin Stamm sustain the high degree of energy that he infuses into his music and that ripples through every aspect of his life? I can tell you right off, it's the power of a potent mind that drives a very disciplined body. Staying in shape is a big part of it. For instance, did you know that Marvin runs about 5 1/2 miles a day?

PS: I can't help but relate that back to trumpet playing. For years I've felt that trumpet playing is like going into a meditative state. That "no mind" state in the present is so valuable. Just being able to 'step out" and bring things back to center.

MS: That's' really true. I had studied with Carmine Caruso for 6 1/2 years. He equated practice to Zen. I think the book he used was "Zen and the Art of Archery". That idea that what is practice, but taking something that your body is unaccustomed to, and doing that action over and over until it becomes a natural part of your body. To bring into play all the muscles in your face, arms hands and fingers and to coordinate and synchronize them to produce something that is pretty extremely complex most of the time. Thinking about James Thompson's Master Class yesterday, I'm trying to think of how he put it. He said, "Playing the instrument should be easy. Learning to play the instrument to make it easy is hard." It has to become a natural part of what you do. Isn't this what athletes do all the time?

PS: Absolutely. It's known that it actually takes about 5,000 repetitions to work an action into your body so that it is more of a response than a conscious process. In most athletic endeavors, anything less than a response is too slow. If there's a thought going on in between, it's not going to work. This is just on the most basic level. To reach an elite status it takes more like 10,000 repetitions to thoroughly work an action into the body. I think many players get confused thinking that it's practice that makes perfect, when it's actually perfect practice that makes perfect. If you're practicing the wrong things, you're just working these negative habits into your body just as effectively as you could have been conditioning the right ones.

MS: Certainly. You don't practice to correct bad habits, bad habits have already become a part of your natural being. You practice to form good habits to take the place of these bad habits.

PS: Talking about James Thompson, he once explained to me that you can't really change a bad habit. It's already been worked into your synapse and neurons through years of effort. What you can do is acquire a new habit in it's place.

MS: That's right. I've gone to every Master Class of his I could go to. I try to go to as many Master Classes as I can. And mostly I try to attend the ones by classical trumpet players. I find that they, particularly people like Jim, have thought so deeply about what's involved in playing. Even to the point of syntax and applying that to how tongue and articulate music by DeFalla as opposed to playing the Shostakovich "Concerto for Piano and Trumpet". All that equates to the language and how you relate to the language. I find that it;s such an important thing to continue to try to learn from people who are really into studying the musical part of the instrument. If you can get into the musical part, the physical part follows. so Many times people approach everything from a technical standpoint. The thing they forget is that music is playing by the ear, not the mouth. The mouth is only a toll to bring what's in your ear to fruition.

PS: Right. The idea that the concept has to dictate what means you use to get there. The technique can never reach the goal without the concept to guide it.

MS: That points up how important it is. You know, so many times people say, "Tell me how you do that". Well how do you tell a person how much to tighten their throat up, or lift their tongue? Those degrees are not natural and they change with very human being just like fingerprints do. The thing that you must know is what you want to hear and then try to do it. If you do that, you eliminate all that stuff that you can't control anyway. It's totally immeasurable. The results come from how the body responds to making music. If it makes music in a musical way, then obviously your body is doing it right.

PS: I always tell players that when I was going through some changes with my embouchure while I was at Juilliard, I also worked at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. I used to go down to the front of the stage and watch everybody play. I heard close to 400 concerts a year. I'd just go down and try to "see" how they did what they did. Eventually, it struck me that the finest players looked like they weren't doing anything. You couldn't see any extreme effort. they were simply blowing, with their faces totally relaxed. Finally, it occurred to me that the more natural your approach, the better off you were going to be. Less is best. This goes back to stress and tension. Any kind of tension in the body works against you. The more you try to contort your face to achieve some abstract, physical/technical end, the more trouble you're going to wind up in.                                 

On Teachers and Teaching

MS: I agree. I hear about students who are fine players in high school, but they go off to college and the first thing the teacher does is to see that the mouthpiece is not exactly in the center with 50% on each lip. They don't hear what the student is doing. Teachers seem to always have to teach and that's not always what's needed. What we really need to do with most students is to guide them. Most students tend to put the horn up to their face exactly where it should be, but it's going to be different for different people. Now if we're talking about extreme cases, where results are obviously bad, that's another thing. I've seen some very strange embouchures that the person had no trouble with, and you could hear that in the kind of sound they made and in everything they did. One being the great trumpet player Markie Markowitz. he played way over to the right side of his mouth. This man had the most biggest, fattest, most beautiful sound.  If you were playing a lead part and it was a little too high for you, you could pass it down to him and he'd play it. He was one of the busiest trumpet players in the New York studios for many, many years. So you can't always make judgments based on what an embouchure looks like.  You have to judge by what it sounds like and how comfortable the player is. If their not having problems, don't fix what ain't broke.

I talk to people like Phil Smith, James Thompson, even horn players, people who are in major positions as performers, and they have come to the same conclusion. yet some people have just refused to learn.  fin that a lot of the problems with teachers is that most have gone through college, got their degrees and have immediately gone into teaching: so they have no real experience in playing or in the real world.

PS: I agree. You know, this point you raise about teachers needing to correct things all the time, I think often turns into negative reinforcement instead of positive conditioning.

MS: Absolutely. Different situations require different remedies. After my first year with Stan Kenton, I was really having problems because I was cutting my lip all the time. I went back to my trumpet teacher in north Texas, John Haynie, and he suggested that I might be playing too far down in the red. "You might want to move the mouthpiece up," he said. And for me this was just a major,  major change, but one that was needed. Years later, Carmine Caruso offered to me the best qualification in deciding when the situation demands a change. He said, "I never change am embouchure unless I see and hear that what the person is doing is terribly damaged. I would rather build on what a person has. I don't care what kind of mouthpiece they've got, what kind of horn they've got, or what there embouchure looks like, as long as their achieving success and there's no damage. If there's a positive step there, I'm going to build on what's comfortable to that person, and most of the other problems will begin to work their way out."

Know Yourself

Another thing I find that always seems to be a problem with trumpet players is finding the rule of common sense. We're all so touchy about anything that should be amiss day to day. If your instrument in combination with your own playing skills and mouthpiece your comfortable with works for you, and you're producing wonderful sounds, then don't look to these things to be the correction of a problem. Just allow yourself to use things that you know work for you, like a practice routine that has been successful for you over the years. Try to look through your problem with something that your body is familiar with. Instead of trying to jump to 'this mouthpiece will help me or this horn will help me,' or by going to this technique that says, 'if I do this, it will solve all my problems' ...you know, the magic bullet. Getting people to realize that common sense is the correct approach, and I'll tell you something that most people don't know that aren't on a level of James Thompson or Phil Smith or Tom Stevens, even Randy Brecker or Tom Harrell, everyone of us experiences problems all the time. We may not talk about it because there's really no reason to. We know that something is amiss. We sit down, we try and work our way through it with a common sense approach using things that in the past have worked for us. Sometimes something's  get to a heavy extreme, but most of us recognize pretty quickly that something's not working the way we want it to. And almost, to a person, we go back to the drawing board starting at the familiar place. DON'T PANIC! Use common sense.

PS: I think that a major myth among brass players is that people like the ones you've mentioned never have any problems. Just the other day I was working with a very fine player who was feeling really badly about himself because he felt he had to work extremely hard to perform a certain concerto. It happened to be one that Doc Severensen had done. This player had convinced himself, he just knew that Doc wouldn't have to work that hard to prepare that piece. He was beating up on himself because he felt the amount of work he had put in meant, somehow, that he was an inferior player. The irony is that we were doing a lot of work for Doc during the that time he was performing this piece and I heard him working certain passages over and over again. But no one believes that. They think that everything they are doing is bad and players like Doc and you are just gods. Gods never have problems.

MS: You're right. That's such a complete myth. We all go through that. There are some things that just come like falling off a log for me, other things don't. Randy Brecker is one of my favorite trumpet players. You can put any chord change in front of him, be it as strange as Chinese sanskrit, and this guy will look at it and play through it immediately, no matter how complex it may be. I find that for me, coming into something like that, I usually have to sit down with a pianist and say, "Will you go over this with me?" Sometimes it takes several times to do that. Then I have to live with the piece for a while. What I'm finding is that it doesn't make any difference whether something comes easy to one person or doesn't to another. The important thing about all of this really tends to be that everyone is in a constant state of learning. Laurie Frink says that, "We're all works in progress...never a finished product." So it doesn't make any difference  if somethings come easy to Randy Brecker and difficult for me. The point is, what do I learn from it?  How does it improve my playing? And even more importantly is the fulfillment of a difficult task that you work your way through and succeed at, which is a thing in our society today. Everyone wants to go to McDonalds and buy it. That's such a fallacy! There's no pleasure in life if everything comes easy.

PS: This is an important issue. the premise that all the players of your level are just superstars, and just so naturally talented. Lord help you if you have to work at something. You should have expected to magically do it all the instant you tried. It's the kind of thing you see with young players early on who are really very talented, but wind up going by the wayside. Sometimes when things come too easy, you lose your appreciation for them. There are other players who may have more difficulties with certain aspects to start, but who are willing to put in the work. They persevere and continually improve. They are the ones who are still in the business, the ones who reach the heights. I was speaking about this very thing just recently with Dave Taylor, who after years of doing all kinds of work and having played with just about everybody, is just beginning to gain world wide recognition as the tremendous artist he is. He was saying that he actually believed that they had let him into Juilliard at the time, as some sort of charity case. He feels it's primarily because of his perseverance that he's gotten to where he is today. Of course, looking at Dave Taylor now, he is actually the type of player that people would want to believe was born playing trombone like a genius.

MS: I've worked with Dave for years and Dave is a heavy practicer. James Thompson is a heavy, heavy practicer. I remember teaching in the summer of 1980 with Tom Stevens and Roger Bobo in Switzerland and they were working on a piece by Meyer Kupfermann, a concerto for piano, tuba and trumpet. It was one of the ugliest and unmusical things that I had ever heard...at the time they were working on it. Six months later, they came to New York and premiered the piece at Merkin Hall. These people came out there and made this piece of avant garde music sound just like the most beautiful of melodies. They had worked so hard. I know they put hours of time in, and we're talking about one of the greatest tuba players of our time and certainly Tom Stevens has got to be one of the greatest, most musical trumpet soloists ever. This guy plays trumpet like a violin or a flute. He plays things that I can't even fathom trying to play. People say, "Marvin, you're technique!", and this and that, and I have to say, "Thank you, but have your heard Tom Stevens lately?"

Rechargeable Batteries

I find myself so inspired by better players. People ask me, "How do you keep your batteries charged? How do you keep your interest going in music? You've been playing for 48 years." I say, I always try to play with musicians who play better than me and I always try to play with everyone I can. If you do that, you hear so many interesting and fine things going on around you. We heard Tim Morrison playing the Haydn yesterday. When I first saw that the Haydn was on the program, I said, "Wow...you know, I've heard this...Why would he want to play this?" But hearing him play, it was like hearing a new piece. This had to be the way Haydn wanted this played. It wasn't a Trumpet Solo, it was a baroque piece of music that he played flute like. The pianist was marvelous. They played it with a lightness that came right out of the period of Haydn. You've heard his symphonies, now you feel this is what his trumpet concerto ought to sound like. Then he played a DeFalla piece, "El Amor Brujo". IN the whole eleven minutes of music I don't think he went as high as a "G" above the staff  on the C trumpet. This audience of trumpet players, who usually would do a 'wave' if somebody hits a double high "C", was absolutely mesmerized by this lower register playing because of the beauty and the musicality of what the person did. When I hear somebody like that play, I just feel like going out into the woods for two weeks and seeing if I can just even approach what that sounded like. That attack, the feeling of how he started the sound. There are things that all of us musicians look for and hunger for. We're not interested in all that athletic stuff. We find it inspiring that other people can do things that we can't do. They inspire us to try to be able to do that, because it is possible.

PS: We were speaking before of the business of being negative and correcting ourselves all the time and fixating on technical aspects. Do you think some of this comes from a lack of playing outlets these days? The focus tends not to be on playing and making music, but practicing to get better so that one might be able to play more in the future.

MS: I'm not sure. I know that usually when work opportunities slow up, certain negativity naturally comes in because we are frustrated and we can't get out and play more. I don't know whether that's a direct cause. I think that more and more we seem to be living in a cynical society. Going back to James Thompson again, he was talking about people who audition for orchestras. Somebody was mentioning to him from another orchestra, that they had heard 50 trumpet players in the final round of auditions and most of the people that had come in sounded 'sad'. Jim said, "Isn't music supposed to be joyous?" and that, sometimes, I think may be a reflection of our society. When we play music, do we play with a joyous feel? If you listen to any of the recordings of Clifford Brown, there's nobody in the world that ever played more joyously than Clifford Brown. Certainly, when you listen to Louie Armstrong, you hear his tremendous joyousness. What makes this music so joyous? What makes Dixie land so good? It's a celebration of life going on there. I think many times we become so serious about what we must do that we don't realize, "This is music." Music itself has been put into the realm of a something so serious that we seem to lose sight of the fact that, as I heard James Thompson and Phil Smith say in a taxi one night..."This is entertainment folks!"

PS: That's an amazing point. To me art is supposed to be there to gain access to an amazing energy source, joy and more. Why is it that people can't tap in anymore? What's keeping them from it"

The Big Picture

MS: Don't you think that part of that may be what we hear in our broadcasting media? What we hear when we turn on the radio and television? We don't hear great music, we have no listening outlet for it...unless you buy CD's. But along that line, when people say, "When jazz was really popular and big bands...." and so on, "DO you that think that will ever come back?" Well, let's think back for a moment to that kind of thing. In the 30's and 40's on radio you hear broadcasts from hotels every night. You had broadcasts from ballrooms. Even when I was on the road in the 60's, you had broadcasts from ballrooms all the time. And you think about all the symphony orchestras that were on the radio every week, and on many different stations. I remember when we first got our television set and I was about 7 years old. We saw orchestras, we saw chamber music, they actually had jazz shows. I remember seeing Freddie Hubbard playing with Art Blakey. Those days that people talk about, good music was among the people. You could go to any small town in Iowa. You could pull a band into Cheyenne, Wyoming. Of course, we're talking about days when the population of the country may have been only 120 million people or less. And yet, people would come from miles around to hear music, and they could turn their radios on and hear music. Good music was around us all the time. None of that is present today.

PS: Why? Is it a lack of participation? Even when people are dancing, they're still participating, especially with live music. The energy that exists is enough to draw people in.

MS: Of course it is. But the thing is that radio stations and television stations believe that the people don't have the intelligence or the intellect to enjoy classical or other music of substance.

PS: But does music only exist on an intellectual level?

MS: it doesn't have to. Today the key word seems to be marketing. The only thing people need to do is to have exposure to it. That's all. Why is it that people want to hear Brahms and Beethoven? They don't really want to hear Tzwilik, or they don't want to hear Harry Partch. They don't even want to hear Shostakovich. Their ears are able to hear the sounds and harmonic structures of pieces like Bach and Vivaldi and up to Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. Most have not been exposed to any of the other great music, so they are afraid of it. Consequently, Many of the orchestras these days only give them that. Well, they're not educating even their own "cultured" audience. But, if you program that along with all those other things, eventually their ears will get accustomed to it. They would hear the trumpet solo from Petroushka and say "ahh". When they hear something and recognize it, they're attracted to stay with it. People out there who are hearing heavy metal and so on, whatever your taste is, "That's personal" but if they had a chance to hear a symphony orchestra or a jazz group where they felt some sort of familiarity with it, then they would be more accepting of the music. But the problem is that the people in the broadcasting media have figured out that the people aren't capable of absorbing that. So we're going to do away with it and only give them what we can sell them. And that's the shame of it.

PS: Yes. I'm so sick and tired of being spoon feed everything I should like and what I should know and what I shouldn't...

MS: Exactly. We talk about all these terrible that are going on in the country, and look what we're feeding people! We're feeding them television shows that only appeal to their prurient interests. We're feeding them pap because we think that they're so shallow, that they have no depth. Whose going to decide that the American public is shallow? Some person sitting up in the top floor of a television studio? The president of a broadcasting company? It's ridiculous, all these marketing things. And these are the kind of things that are creating a negative society. 

A Simple Plan

The lack of hearing good music, of seeing good art, of seeing ballet on television, modern dance. Understanding that this is what is sadly lacking and could cure a lot of these problems. Talk about the latch key kids and what they do after school. All this money that we put into all these prisons. Can you imagine if they took a small amount of that and tried to experiment in some major cities? Maybe not New York, but let's say a place like Nashville, Birmingham, Atlanta, Milwaukee. Cities that size where you could build a community music center. Where after school these kids could go from the time that they're out of school and play in a band led by a local musician or band director. Where they rehearse concert band, or orchestra or jazz band, and where are something productive and positive. If caught onto, how much fun this would be. What a difference something like that would make and what an audience it would create for music.

PS: It depends on what you put a priority on, what you value in society. I guess what we value, I certainly don't find very productive, but it's as you say. Certain people have decided that that's what people are interested in, so that's what we get.

MS: Well it certainly has affected what we do. So many of the things we're talking about, I know some people would say, "What does that have to do with music and playing the trumpet?" It has a great deal to do with playing trumpet and playing music, because if nothing else we must understand that none of us would be able to play if we didn't create an audience. If we can;t expose people to music so that their ears become educated to hearing it there will be no one to play for.

PS: Doesn't art not exist until there's someone there to share what you're expressing?

MS: Absolutely, absolutely! You know, many jazz artists should be more aware of that. It doesn't mean that you have to be condescending in you art, but it does mean that you have to be aware of the people who are out there. It can't just be something that you and me do, but in the meantime everyone else is out.

PS: It's very interesting, a couple of weeks ago I read James Cagney's autobiography. In it he told this story about Ralph Bellamy who had been working on a set together with a very young actor. When they rehearsed the scene everything was fine. When they went in front of the camera, the director would shout, "Cut" and they'd have to do it again. It happened two and three times. So Bellamy goes over to the director and says, "What's wrong, what's going on?" The director let him see the rushes and Bellamy instantly realized that the young man had been acting, as he described, as though he had been standing in the middle of Times Square in a drenching rain, freezing cold and urinating down his leg. Now, this sensation made him feel nice and warm, but nobody else had any idea of what was going on. He had been very self contained. Everything was about "him". It wasn't about putting out what he was feeling to anyone else. He was so caught up in what he was doing, when the real point is supposed to be expression. Getting other people to feel the same thing that you do. When you talk about the intellectual level, condescending art, we're all human beings. If things are on an elemental human level, we're all the same. We should all be able to be touched. The intellectual level is nice. It's icing. It keeps you busy, but there is something more basic. That's why you have Beethoven, Mozart, Faddis, you, Big Bands...great art is great art. It's not because of intellectual content, it's because it touches us on a human level.

MS: Absolutely. But if you never experience it, you're going to be incapable of being touched by it for the most part.

Speaking the Language

PS: We've talked about why people aren't receptive to music. Why they can't pick up on it, or basically what I call not being able to speak the language. Whenever I go back and hear an early orchestral recording of, say Stravinsky, it's very obvious that those people were not comfortable with the language of Stravinsky at that time. Forty or fifty years later it's become a normal part of the repertoire and people's way of thinking. They can get their brains, heart and souls around it now, but it takes time.

MS: I remember the first time I heard anything by Stravinsky and I couldn't understand it. And I was into Beethoven, and I was into Brahms and Dvorak.The New World Symphony I believe was the first recording I had ever bought when I was 12 years old, and then how it became familiar. I remember the first time I heard Ornette Coleman. You know people would say, "Wow, listen to this," and I said, "That's the ugliest thing I ever heard." Then I began to find that this music and this funny, little, pocket cornet trumpet that Don Cherry was playing, I mean this all became very, very interesting to me. You have to become familiar with it in a way. The interesting thing about it is, and maybe this is another point that maybe leads right to this, is the fact that like so many other things in life, people at an early age are open to anything. From birth to 4 or 5. It isn't until they reach 4 or 5 that they start building up fences to other things. This is why elementary music programs are so important, because even if they start an elementary music program in the 2nd grade, they're already late, because they're parents are only accustomed to listening to rock and roll. But the thing that's the saving grace is that a jazz group or a chamber group, or a flute player, or a symphony orchestra can go out to a school and these kids see a person holding something and making such interesting sounds, they're fascinated. From the second grade to the seventh grade, many things by the time that 5 years passes, it's no longer cool to be fascinated by anything. They've been told that to like symphony or jazz music or anything besides what the crowd wants, is no longer acceptable. The thing is that you and I are not geniuses and we figured all these things out through discussions with many people we know that are educated and have experienced this before us. And now we're in that place. Why is it that these supposedly very smart people that we've elected and pay all this money to support in Washington DC and in our state capitols have not figured any of this out? How to really make people's lives better.

PS: Boy oh boy. Especially today. All I keep hearing is, "We need more control. We need to take freedoms away." What's the percentage of American people who are willing to give up freedoms to have greater control? It's like, "Oh my God!" They're just keeping the real point away from us. These people are unhappy. Quality of life is not what people are looking for. What can we really do to get back to the disease, not just treating symptoms all the time?

Gaining Utopia?

MS: Absolutely. The thing about all this unrest and keeping people undereducated and in a crude state of mind is that it makes it easier to control them. Let's take the part of, "How can music be so positive?" If you take a young person and put an instrument in their hands, they say, "I want to play the flute, I want to play the clarinet, I want to play the trumpet." Before they can really be part of anything they have to use their own initiative, their own motivation to learn an instrument well enough to be able to come together with other people who have done the same thing. Then they have to come together and play this music as a group. Within that group they have to learn when their part is more important, or when they should become supportive of someone else. To be able to work and continue to improve, not only as  individuals, which you keep doing by your own individual motivation and practice, but as a group which you do by rehearsing. Usually led by someone who has knowledge and experience to bring all these talents together. What they do, if successful, is to achieve a product that's pleasing to many of the people who come to hear it. Now if you think about that group of people, that's nothing more than a microcosm of a successful society. Each person coming together, bringing their own natural talents that they've educated and trained themselves to do. From one segment of society we need this, from another we need that. We need this now, so this person is important. We need you tomorrow, so stay back and be supportive today and we will bring you up tomorrow. We need all these kinds of systems to come together to make things work. And people say that music isn't important. All this is done in a manner, by the way, that is non violent, pleasing, expressive of people's emotions and brings out feelings from those people who are surrounding them.

PS: They keep talking about appropriate expression of emotion. My son went to a camp last summer and one of the speakers there was Darryl Hickman. He's a very famous actor, acting coach, producer, he's one of those people who has done it all. He was saying that one of the best ways to express your emotions is through art. And it's acceptable. You can express great anger, you can express great joy, you can express everything. You can just get it out instead of having it sit inside and eat away from not having proper expression. Everybody needs purging.

MS: Most of the time we find our purging through...

PS: Self destructive means.

MS: Yes. Like a lot of athletics, you see little league baseball, where the parents of the kids are on the side lines getting angry and hostile instead of telling kids, "This is an outlet, let things go!" Yeah, you want to win, but if you don't win, go over to someone else and say, "Hey, congratulations. Great job!"

PS: Well, then again it's a focus on what we value. Do we value learning, discipline? Learning that, if I don't do well today, I need to work harder. I need to come back. This is only going to make me stronger and better.

Or is it just a matter of, "Second place is no good?"     

MS: And appreciating those who did win.

PS: Absolutely.

Setting Standards

MS: And saying, "Hey, I'll just have to work harder to reach that goal 'cause I want to do that too." Our whole priority is wrong. And part of the problem is the whole mind set that says we're all equal. We're not equal, we're different! Music is extremely important. The music comes out of all the other things in our lives because, basically, music has a way of expressing all of those emotions that we feel as human beings. I think it's important to understand that. It creates (for the most part) from all of us, an appreciation for what we do for each other and how important that really is. The thing that all of this leads to, I guess, is to say that we who are involved in music, who are really deeply involved, truly experience this. Like you and John. You and John know everybody. You've come in contact with everyone. You work with all of us on many things. I've worked with John even before I knew you. I used to see John at Giardinelli's working fro my dear friend Bob. All the things that we've worked together on over the years only show that we are a community. Those who are doing things think deeply about what is going on around them and how important that view is. Your contributions are a great part of all that I do. This is exemplified by the collaboration that John and I have had for these many years, and I appreciate it greatly. Because beyond everything else, we're only human. People say, "My gosh, Jim Thompson, Tim Morrison, Doc Severensen," whoever and they look at them as though they're human. You know what? We all get up in the morning, our hair is messed up...

PS: (Laughing) Not yours, I can't believe it!

Gaining Perspective

MS: Even mine. Those of use who have hair. So what we are talking about here, all that we've done is taken a certain thing that's a talent of ours and developed that to a high degree. Doing that does not excuse us from being human beings. And if doing something like that really makes your feet leave the ground, then think for a minute about what you're really doing. We're just blowing hot air through a pipe. What we do is very special, but we should be bale to put it in perspective in relationship to what life is and to the contributions that each of us makes to many people and to each other, and that's the important thing.

PS: I agree. I know early on, being in music schools and later working in a community of artists, it always made me feel bonded to everyone because I always felt that there was a certain common consciousness that we shared. We were different. We had other goals and other focuses. Like you said about admiring people. What a terrible thing not to acknowledge somebody who has succeeded and on that kind of level, with that degree of accomplishment. You can only admire them because you know, more than most, what it took to get there.

MS: Absolutely. But let's take just a short thing. How many times have I called you up just to tell you that maybe I was having a problem, and could you help me out? What is your suggestion, what do you think?

PS: (pauses, laughs) A lot?!?

MS: Exactly. You've gotten calls from how many other musicians in top spots and symphony orchestras and jazz groups and everything else, so you know, what does that say? It really says that all of us achieve certain things in our lives that contribute to the lives of others. You have an ability to help me with things that maybe I'm incapable of doing myself. I need your product as you need my product. You need to hear my music, but I need something from you to be able to make that music. And that's the whole structure right there. It's a very important thing.

PS: Thank you so much Marvin!

    For more information on Marvin including concert schedule and CD sales,

visit his web site at:   www.marvinstamm.com