On his book Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture
Cover Interview of December 25, 2008
Lastly
There is no book like Hotter Than That. There are a handful of histories of the trumpet, but they are extremely technical and academic. I like to believe that I have made the instrument come alive as a force in people’s lives. This is why I have included my own experience of the horn along with the role the trumpet has played at different historical moments. One reviewer said that the book is about how music helps us discover love and that through love we discover the world. The book goes beyond the technical aspects of the trumpet’s history and its manufacture and looks at how people have devoted themselves to playing this most difficult of instruments. Only someone who really loves the horn and the music it makes can master it. I hope that people who read the book will understand what it means to love the horn and its sound.
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
Lastly
There is no book like Hotter Than That. There are a handful of histories of the trumpet, but they are extremely technical and academic. I like to believe that I have made the instrument come alive as a force in people’s lives. This is why I have included my own experience of the horn along with the role the trumpet has played at different historical moments. One reviewer said that the book is about how music helps us discover love and that through love we discover the world. The book goes beyond the technical aspects of the trumpet’s history and its manufacture and looks at how people have devoted themselves to playing this most difficult of instruments. Only someone who really loves the horn and the music it makes can master it. I hope that people who read the book will understand what it means to love the horn and its sound.
© 2008 Krin Gabbard