On his book Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture
Cover Interview of December 26, 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.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
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