Randy Brecker, the Grammy Award-winning American jazz trumpeter, Flughal Hornetson composer,

is our special guest on this episode of Music Matters with Darryl Craig Harris.

Randy Brecker, how are you doing today? Well, I woke up feeling pretty good, actually. So so far, so good. Yeah, exactly. Every day you wake up is a good day.

Yeah, I'm glad I'm here. I know. Yeah, I hear you. So you're actually in New York, but you said you're in the Hamptons.

Yeah, I'm about two hours plus out of the city and have been for about 11 full time, about 11 years. Awesome. Yeah, New York City, it seems to be tough these days. I mean, it's, it's always been not so easy to make the living, but I know they've had challenges, and then we've had, obviously, just dealt with all the COVID stuff. So, what have you been doing during that period? Have you been recording? You've been writing or what have you been up to? Well, I haven't been writing much these days. I don't know, maybe I'll feel like it

as time moves on, but I have done a lot of recording for other people, along with my wife who is a wonderful pro tools engineer and editor, we just have a good process going that people, I guess, found out about and we get calls all the time to either record and she does some of the arrangements. Awesome.

And she can we must have done between 253, 300 sessions throughout the years. Great downstairs in our small studio, but it works really, really well. We just did three tracks for a gentleman, fine, John Bonne sing, Eric, Eric Gollett's last week with featuring a lot of New York, A, A musicians, and I did all my part.

It's at our studio and it worked out really well. Yeah, it seems to be like that's the sort of the new normal even even before COVID, that's become because then you don't have to travel into the city, right? You can kind of control your environment, and that's awesome that your wife is a pro tools person, and so when did you first set up a home studio like that to get to prepare to do that kind of thing?

That's a good question. Probably I suppose about 15 years ago when we when we had the apartment in New York, we set up in our living room, which was a corner apartment, and it was a pre-war apartment, so it was heavily kind of fortified, and the sound was good there too.

So we did quite a bit of recording back then to the last decade, and we moved like I said out here 11 years, and it's more of an official studio, we have a piano set of drums down there, and a little more space, and it's and brought some outdoor equipment, and it works really well, we got a really good sound too, so I think words spread around, so we're always pretty busy with that.

Of course in COVID haven't been doing very few live gigs, in fact, and it's starting up again in August for me anyway, I'm happy to say, but I think this whole year and a half I've played in front of people and limited lots of people, maybe twice.

I went out to Aspen, did a couple shows about a year ago, and about in April I flew out to Cincinnati, and it was a very nice club out there, I played two nights at that club, in front of limited capacity, I think it was 25%.

Right, yeah, and the rest of just been home, you know, couple Zoom kind of stuff we set up with music and some, some things for educational events, playing and talking, some workshops.

Yeah, do you like teaching, is that something that you've found a passion for, or how is that for you?

Yeah, well, I've been doing a lot of workshops, and in that respect, I don't really teach one on one, or more like clinic kind of workshops.

It's kind of generalized clinic, what I practice, how to practice, more set to jazz playing, swinging and improvising, some has to do with my writing process, things like that.

And it's always, usually people asking questions, I also did one recently, really more of a presentation for the ITG international trumpet guild where there weren't, it was filmed ahead of time, so I spent an hour and a half just talking into my computer, and we did some musical examples, but that's a little harder to do, it really helps.

Yeah, like if I say I have an audience that that bouts off, yeah, you need the interaction, you know, interaction is the name of the game on a lot of these things, so it'll take my mind to a place it hasn't been, but that came out pretty good too, I think, you know, I've had a lot of experience by now on Zoom and doing these kinds of things, right, which is always have with me now.

Yeah, so I think I think the great thing with the Zoom, and what I found even doing the podcast is it basically opens you up to international.

You know, audience, and you can read just a whole different animal, right, and now, now because of the internet, everything's so global, I guess, for, for better, for worse, you know, perspective.

But so actually you mentioned your writing process, and I mean, you're actually a very prolific writer and with all your albums with your brother, that's those are kind of hollow ground for many, many musicians, including myself, tell me about your writing process, is it something that you do alone?

Is it you into collaborating a lot? What's that for you? How does that work?

...