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Jonathan Pugh: Music of Don Lanphere
$12 general

In a 1987 interview, sax-legend Don Lanphere spoke in glowing terms of the unassuming, hugely-talented trumpeter, Jon Pugh, who had appeared on Out of Nowhere and Into Somewhere. Those two Hep label albums marked Lanphere's return to jazz after a long period in the doldrums of bebop-fueled drug addiction. Pugh was, said Lanphere, "truly remarkable," and between the first recording in 1982 and the second a year later, Pugh had "constructed about five years of growth." When they were doing the second recording, Lanphere said he invited Pugh to just pick a tune that he would like the band to record, and Pugh settled on "Avalon," a song from the 1920s. The result, recalled the leader: Pugh would "very nearly steal the album away from me with it."

Lanphere had a lot to do with Pugh's trajectory. An old high-school classmate of Pugh's father, he watched Pugh Jr. come up in the music scene in Wenatchee and had seen him head out on the cocktail-lounge circuit for a year before returning home. And then, said Lanphere, "I figured: as long as he's here…" The two took to rehearsing together, playing along to Jamey Aebersold records in the basement of the Lanphere-family music store. "That's how it started," Lanphere said. Both, of course, went on to astonishing mastery of their instruments. Lanphere could then say of Pugh: "It's really rather amazing that he has created kind of a world-trumpet voice here from our little town of Wenatchee, Washington."

Pugh would accompany Lanphere through much of his revitalized career, on the bandstand and on recordings, along with other players whom Lanphere encouraged, such as pianist Marc Seales, bassist Doug Miller, and drummer John Bishop. Now, five years after the sax great's death, Jon Pugh pays tribute to his friend, mentor, and longtime boss with a retrospective that focuses on the work of Lanphere's classic quintet of the 1970s and 1980s.