The Boss Brass with Guido Basso

Guido Basso was a charter member of the Boss Brass and one of their two great trumpet soloists.  He was a child prodigy on trumpet, from Montreal, and went to the Conservatoire de musique du Quebec where Maynard Ferguson had attended a few years earlier.  Today he is 77 years old.

I love his solos, his ideas, and how they lay so right on this piece.  That’s what makes the great soloists– they have the ability to play more than just notes.  The solo makes sense and flows together throughout.  Guido is a master at making improvisation sound easy and organized when for most of us it’s a train wreck.

Don’t you know he did a lot of listening to Clark Terry?  His flugelhorn playing reminds me so much of Clark Terry at times.  Clark died earlier this year and would have been about 16 years older than Guido. It’s all interconnected in music.   We are all influenced by everyone else, and it has always been that way.  Jazz is a product of everyone, and has evolved because of the great ones listening to everything around them.  Jazz is a product of all of us.  Rob McConnel may have written the composition, but Guido Basso guided the recording into a statement of his own within the written score, based upon Guido’s experiences of playing and hearing jazz.  I have an idea that Rob wrote it with Guido in mind.  This album as released in 1976, when Guido would have been 39.

I can’t imagine how much fun it must be to be able to improvise this fast and this well, and what an incredible mind you need to process all that information in such a short space.  As a lead player, I’m always in awe of the jazz player’s mind.  Guido is one of my favorites, and this piece shows you why.  Also, how about that band behind him?