Blog 1A: Who Influences You As a Creative Person?

I am a person of many talents, and probably the most prominent is my musical talent. There are many people who have influenced me musically throughout the years, one of whom is Jiggs Whigham. Jiggs is an exceptional trombonist. He can do things with a trombone that one would think impossible, playing almost subconsciously. Seeing him play in person has definitely changed the way I play trombone. Seeing the way he manipulates the instrument to make it do what he wants to do had a profound effect on my playing style. The sweet sound he produced could only make me want to emulate it. After a week of working with Jiggs I would go home, and work, and work, and work, to try to get that same sound. I got close, but the only way to get that pristine of a sound, it takes years and years of playing one’s trombone. I could only wish for that kind of sound, and keep on playing with the goal to sound this beautiful:

Jiggs Whigham is also a master jazz musician. Jazz is his musical genre of choice, and for good reason. As great as he is at manipulating the sound coming out of his trombone, he is equally as great manipulating the notes and music he plays. The way he plays tells stories, loud and fast telling of action, and slow and melancholy telling of love or sadness, or both. He expresses the notes as an author would their words, and puts so much feeling into it to create a sort of active subtext that one can pick up on if attentive. He sometimes does this without even looking at paper. Jiggs is so skilled a musician that he can pick a key, and construct something out of nothing based off of that one note he says. He improvises, and just goes with it. He starts with the basic scale in whatever key he’s playing in, and branches off of it, creating this sort of thing:

Perhaps the greatest reason Jiggs is such an influence on me, though, is that I have worked with him three times at Jazz Seminars. That last video you saw was at one of those Jazz Seminars in SHAPE, Belgium, and I was actually in that room while that filming was going on. That was one of many pieces of instruction Jiggs gave us, and the entire week was devoted to us students becoming better jazz musicians, and putting on a concert at the end of that week. Jiggs was there to direct the concert, and give us professional advice as to how to get better. The best way he could help most of us was to show us, and being a trombone player myself, the influence he had on me was probably greater than that on, say, the saxophones, or the trumpets. I say this because Jiggs was predominantly a trombone player, so the lessons he gave were more didactic for us trombone players:

With lessons like that, combined with his beautiful tone and amazing manipulation of his notes, Jiggs Whigham was very influential in my trombone playing, causing me to be more creative and musical.