Sheila Tracy Talks to James Morrison

James MorrisonJames Morrison is a musical phenomenon, of that there is not the slightest doubt. The heights that even the most talented of musicians work hard to achieve, he achieves through doing what comes naturally. To James Morrison, playing a musical instrument is as natural as walking and breathing, he just does it. But then he's been doing it since he was seven years old when he picked up his very first cornet.

"There weren't a lot of musical instruments at home but the school band had about 50 instruments and only about 30 people in the band so I was able to go to the bandmaster and say 'Can I take one of those home or one of those?'

Basically I got my first music lessons at school, if you can call them music lessons. There was the original lesson on, this is how you blow it, and I think after that we were left to our own devices, which was actually a good thing in retrospect. When I wanted to play the trombone and wanted to know the positions I'd go up to one of the trombonists and ask where the notes were. They'd show you and you'd say 'thank you' and go away and play.

I never thought too much about an embouchure, you just blow it and it works, don't mess with it. People often ask me why I don't warm up and I say "I played last night so I'm warmed up!" I never practise, isn't it great! Early on I did a lot of playing as opposed to practising. I was always on jam sessions and getting together with other musicians, so unbeknown to me I guess, I spent many hours developing my embouchure and that sort of thing, just having a jam session and a good time. I always had a good time, I was never much interested in work. Sitting in a room on your own and slogging away at scales and arpeggios and things never really appealed to me.

A music teacher in high school told me I had to practise my scales and I asked the question every kid must ask "Why?" And I got the answer I think everyone gets, 'You have to learn all the scales because they're all in the songs'. So I just applied a bit of lazy man's logic and said 'Well if all the scales are in the songs I'll play the songs instead and that way I'll learn the scales!' The funny thing is I was being facetious at the time but it's true! If you play enough songs you'll be able to play all the scales.

When I'm doing clinics I explain to brass players, they get this mental image of high as way up there somewhere, I say turn it on it's side. With a pianist do they suddenly go red in the face and get all ready for a high note? I mean the high ones are over there and the low ones are over there. And if you can think about it like that, there's no problem."

Don LusherWhen he was 13 years old James Morrison entered the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music, where Don Lusher, holding a Master Class there at the time, was so impressed by the young student, he recalls asking him if he'd like to play lead trombone! By the time James graduated with a Jazz Studies Diploma in 1980, he'd already made his American debut at the Monterey Jazz Festival.

"It was an interesting relationship between myself and the Sydney Conservatorium. I guess the problem of complying with some of the more rigid things you have to have in an institution, didn't always come easy. At the time, I was playing every night at a place called the Paradise Jazz Cellar in Kings Cross in Sydney and that gig didn't finish until 4 a.m. and so a nine o'clock class was going to be tricky! They knew I was playing in the club and they'd come down and listen.

Although I hadn't always been where I should have been, fortunately and to their credit, the powers that be at the Conservatorium realised there was no problem because when the chips were down and the time came to play at recitals at the end of the year, I got through and I ended up back there teaching! I spent nearly four years in the Jazz Department at the Conservatorium in Sydney until the touring schedule got too heavy. Funnily I didn't find it a problem to be there as the teacher, only as a student. I think it was because I got the chance to opt for when I wanted the classes. I always made sure there was nothing before two in the afternoon!"

Watching James Morrison on stage you know he is having the time of his life without the inhibitions that many performers feel suffering from nerves.

"I've never really suffered from nerves. When I was eight years old and had been playing for a year, I certainly had nerves then. I got on stage for my first solo performance, playing the trombone, a duet with a pianist. You can imagine an eight year old, and I wasn't very big, coming on with a trombone that was bigger than him. I could have practically stood there and let the slide fall off and all the parents would have applauded! It was a sure thing but I didn't know that. I walked out and everyone applauded and smiled and I played my little piece, who knows how crook it was, and there was tumultuous applause because they were all the mums and dads. I thought 'This is alright, this is fun' and I've sort of basically kept that feeling ever since. Every time I walk on a stage I think this is the good bit. Regardless of what else goes wrong in every other sphere of life, whenever I walk onto a stage I think 'Thank goodness, at least for the next couple of hours everything's going to be okay because I'm on stage where I belong. I've never actually had nerves, it's more like coming home going onto the stage. It's not something I designed, if you know what I mean, it's how it happened."

All the family are musical although James describes his father as 'the world's worst clarinettist'; his mother plays the alto sax and piano, his sister the trumpet and she's also a professional dancer. His brother John is the drummer in his Australian band which he transports around the country to their various gigs in his private plane, piloted by himself. He decided that with so many instruments, the bill for excess baggage would be more than the cost of running his own plane!

"I don't play the drums. I play the double bass but I don't play any other strings and in the woodwinds I don't play flute. But basically I play all the brass, saxophones, piano. I haven't played clarinet for the last couple of years but I have spurts of clarinet playing when there's a reason to, but most of the time on the reeds, I'm playing tenor and alto sax and soprano maybe.

All the instruments came along at around the same time. Somebody said I should learn the piano as everyone should learn the piano so I got given a book called John Thompson's Piano Method. Everyone's got it all over the English speaking world, that's how you learn to play the piano. I remember getting about half way through the First Grade book and thinking this was no fun at all. I was spending more time reading the music than playing and I wasn't interested in that so I gave that a miss. Then shortly afterwards I heard Erroll Garner and I said 'Now that's what I want to play like' and of course I got told, 'Well back to the red book' But I thought 'No, no, not that'. I just played as much as I could and got hold of different records and listened. It took some time but eventually I worked out what was going on and it was always a matter of having a sound firmly in your mind that you wanted and then finding it. I'm not a bad reader. Reading's like a lot of things, it comes with practice and you can get rusty. If I'm just playing and improvising and don't do any reading for several months then if you've got to sightread something tough, it takes you 10 or 15 minutes to get into gear.

It's hard to say which instrument I find the most difficult. The hardest to play because they're physically enervating, are some of the small ones like the piccolo trumpet. You feel like you're blowing down a garden hose when someone's got their finger over the other end. But technically speaking, the trombone is harder to play without the valves and with the slide. The articulation on that is much harder than on any of the valved instruments but then it's quite easy to blow compared to a trumpet. So I think they even out.

I never really had a trombone hero, they always disappointed me. They were great trombonists but no one stuck out for me like listening to Dizzy Gillespie when I would say 'That's my thing' or on the piano, Erroll Garner or Oscar Peterson. There were all these very, very good trombonists but no one that grabbed me in the same way. I think it was nothing to do with how well they played, it was more how I wanted to sound on the instrument.

When I heard Dizzy as a youngster I said 'That's how I want to sound on the trumpet' and the same with the piano and the saxophone. I heard Johnny Hodges and that was how I wanted to sound on the alto. I didn't hear a trombonist, good as they were, who played in such a way I said 'Yes, that's how I want to sound'. I had a different idea in my mind how I wanted the trombone to sound. That might be partly because I play all the other instruments, I have a slightly different approach to the trombone so I had another way in mind to play it."

James Morrison is not only a brilliant instrumentalist, he is also a great entertainer. Audiences love him from the moment he walks on stage, looking not unlike a cuddly koala bear. And like all great entertainers, he has a party trick, playing trombone and trumpet together, well almost.

"Playing 'fours' on trombone and trumpet works because I have the slide locked and play the trombone with one hand and the trumpet with the other. If you get up into the right register on the trombone there's enough notes up there close together if you use your lips a bit. You can also grab the slide with a couple of fingers on the hand that's got the trumpet, pull it down and if you balance the trombone just in the right spot with the slide in fourth position it will stay there, especially if you don't put quite enough water on it! It's an age old tradition to trade 'fours', he plays a bit, you play a bit and you try to outdo each other. If you do it with yourself you always win! It's a good party trick, guaranteed to liven the audience up!"

With another stunning performance under his belt, James Morrison boards the plane home, presenting his Frequent Flyer Miles card at the check in desk, which ensures him at least one free First class return ticket from Australia to the UK once a year. That will give you some idea of the millions of miles he travels from his home on the Sydney waterfront. When he's there with his wife, a former Miss Australia and his three sons, there's nothing he likes better than to go fishing to catch their supper with five year old Sam. For James Morrison it's a great life.

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