On his book Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture
Cover Interview of December 25, 2008
The wide angle
The basic thesis of Hotter Than That is that the trumpet has been associated, rightly or wrongly, with masculinity. The men who have played it have jealously guarded their exclusive access to the instrument. In one tribe along the Amazon, for example, if a woman so much as looked at a trumpet, she was killed. Perhaps because it can make more noise than just about anything except a bomb blast, men have used the trumpet for ceremonies, most notably the welcoming of kings. A monarch succeeds grandiloquently in establishing his power if his trumpeters make a terrible racket before he arrives on the scene. Of course, a trumpet makes the first sound that a soldier hears in the morning and the last sound he hears as he falls on the battlefield. In the religion of God the Father, we know that a trumpet brought down Jericho and that a trumpet call will announce the End of Days. When sons and grandsons of slaves created jazz in the early 20th century by playing the trumpet loudly and aggressively, they found a brand new way to assert themselves as men. Any other assertion of masculinity might have got them lynched! These audacious young black men must have been astounded when white people smiled and applauded their music rather than warning them about being “uppity.”
Many white men have even sought to enhance their own masculinity by imitating African American trumpeters. This is not to say that women cannot and have not played the trumpet. The book documents the many contributions that women have made to the instrument’s history. There is no denying, however, that the trumpet has been made to serve the needs of men throughout its history.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The wide angle
The basic thesis of Hotter Than That is that the trumpet has been associated, rightly or wrongly, with masculinity. The men who have played it have jealously guarded their exclusive access to the instrument. In one tribe along the Amazon, for example, if a woman so much as looked at a trumpet, she was killed. Perhaps because it can make more noise than just about anything except a bomb blast, men have used the trumpet for ceremonies, most notably the welcoming of kings. A monarch succeeds grandiloquently in establishing his power if his trumpeters make a terrible racket before he arrives on the scene. Of course, a trumpet makes the first sound that a soldier hears in the morning and the last sound he hears as he falls on the battlefield. In the religion of God the Father, we know that a trumpet brought down Jericho and that a trumpet call will announce the End of Days. When sons and grandsons of slaves created jazz in the early 20th century by playing the trumpet loudly and aggressively, they found a brand new way to assert themselves as men. Any other assertion of masculinity might have got them lynched! These audacious young black men must have been astounded when white people smiled and applauded their music rather than warning them about being “uppity.”
Many white men have even sought to enhance their own masculinity by imitating African American trumpeters. This is not to say that women cannot and have not played the trumpet. The book documents the many contributions that women have made to the instrument’s history. There is no denying, however, that the trumpet has been made to serve the needs of men throughout its history.