The Brooklyn Rail

The trumpet is an instrument of war. Created from a DNA-twining of volume and stridency, it was meant to be heard across the field of battle. But as with any tool, time has brought change. During the Industrial Revolution, its architecture and materials were altered; the trumpet grew valves, expanding the limited calls of the bugle into dynamic and fleet chromaticism, and heavy metals tempered its brilliance, darkening its sound. And as the tool developed, so did its use. The trumpet’s battle cry was softened so it could fit discreetly inside the modern orchestra. Some players, like Miles Davis, went even further, coaxing whispered intimacies from its vibrating metal. As the instrument became modern, it gained sensitivity, but it also lost some of its teeth. The metallic flash of high notes and the fast fingers of contemporary players are brilliant, but they feel slightly safe, like the shimmering brilliance of a flame without the danger of fire.

Herb Robertson, however, was a musician who nurtured the trumpet’s primordial violence. I first encountered Herb’s playing on a used copy of Tim Berne’s Sanctified Dreams (Columbia, 1988). Berne’s tunes were high tech warfare; long, angular edifices that seemed, to my prejudiced ears, solely constructed to hold up under the oncoming apocalypse of Herb’s solos. In the end, they almost always crumbled under the screaming fervor of his trumpet, bursting into a chaos that was endlessly exciting. I heard Sanctified Dreams as a rural fifteen year old, used to being told what jazz was from DownBeat, and how the trumpet should sound from the old guys in the local big band. Berne’s backbeats and atonal melodies were already tickling something new in me, but when Herb took over, it touched something reptilian. “That’s the trumpet,” I thought. “That’s what the trumpet wants to do.”

But Herb was more than simply a destroyer of worlds. His music also contained lightness, sensitivity, and a respect for tradition. His 1988 JMT record, Shades of Bud Powell, shows a precision and sincere love for jazz history. A tribute to one of bebop’s greatest pianists and composers, Herb’s playing displays all the precocity of that era’s best: the histrionics of Dizzy Gillespie, the cool of Miles Davis, the high-wire act of Fats Navarro. Herb’s sound is buoyant, his lines clean, his harmonies transparent. This is the trumpet at its most modern, a musical tool of violin-like acrobatics and the sweet vocal whisper of a balladeer. Near the end of Shades, Herb plays Powell’s “The Fruit” with tubist Bob Stewart walking the bass lines and Joey Baron swinging with brushes on a phone book. A fast and complex bebop tune, Herb’s Harmon-muted horn sounds like an angry wasp caught under a plastic cup as he springs through Powell’s harmonies, zig-zagging violently at a volume just above a murmur. This is a side of his playing that was often ignored by critics and listeners of the time in deference to his more avant-garde bluster. But in their desire for thrills, they missed a part of what made Herb special: he had complete fluency in the trumpet’s language, from the intimacy of its whisper and its controlled sense of poetry to its call to bloodshed.

Herb died suddenly in December at the age of 73. The last time we spent together was just before the pandemic, at a big band reading session near the West Side Highway. We met each other on the snow-covered street outside, and swapped trumpet jokes and warm-up routines on the slow elevator ride to the studio. When I asked what he’d been doing with himself, he said he’d been taking care of his mother in Jersey. She’d been ill a long time, and her care had been a full-time job. He wasn’t playing much in town, he said. “Not much at all, in fact, maybe a few gigs in Europe.” He got quiet then, and I didn’t push. But seeing the horn in his hand that day felt right, it seemed so natural to him: an old, true love. And when Herb took a solo—with his trademark audaciousness and care—it took me back to dropping the needle on Sanctified Dreams for the first time.

Maybe the trumpet is actually more human than machine. It contains its own history, and it wants to correspond with the world on its own terms. Like us, the trumpet exists in order to communicate something deep and unique. It wants someone to coax something real from it; it wants to be understood. Herb Robertson spoke trumpet. He knew how to tell its stories. He knew its past and future. Herb understood what the trumpet can do, and more importantly, he understood what it wants to do. With Herb Robertson’s passing, the trumpet lost a soulmate.