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Bruno Leicht

Bruno Leicht studied jazz trumpet in Cologne from 1985 to 1990 and is an examined music teacher. He is currently mostly active as performer in Cologne and Berlin.

He gives regular jazz history classes at the Cologne Music College.

Career (a rough overview):

After some gigs with local small groups he founded "Blue Seven & The Ghosts" which did several productions for the Bayerischer Rundfunk, the WDR, and some Polish radio station (1988 to 1992).

"Blue Seven & The Ghosts" was inspired by Leicht's "private" workshop group which he lead subversively parallel to the official "International Jazz Workshop" in Siena under master trumpeter Enrico Rava.

The repertoire of the band (trumpet, three saxes, piano, bass & drums) consisted of famous blues compositions (St. Louis Blues, All Blues, Now's The Time) and own compositions, mostly in the blues form (Out Of The Window, Basta Casino aka June's Blues, and Not So Monkish!).

From 1989 on - after Leicht had listened extensively to Booker Little and Charles Mingus - his compositions became harmonically and formally more complex.

His trumpet style can be described as "rooted in the swinging tradition with an 'old' sound, but a modern harmonic conception" (Lothar Lewien, Berlin, friend and biographer of Chet Baker & Charlie Mariano).

Leicht is influenced by trumpeters Louis Armstrong, Harry James, Roy Eldridge, and Fats Navarro, to name a few of the traditional cats he tirelessly loves to listen to; whereas Booker Little, Kenny Dorham, Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, or Kenny Wheeler are representing the more modern players of his musical family.

He also was and still is inspired by other instrumentalists like Stan Getz, Bill Evans, Lester Young, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane or Steve Lacy.

To name all the composers who impressed and inspired Leicht (jazz or otherwise) would fill an entire encyclopedia, and so are there only two he would list as #1 of the chart: Mozart & Monk.

His current working bands are "Brew Lite's Free Lights" with Andreas Wagner on clarinet & tenorsax, Christian Ramond on bass, and Nils Tegen on drums; and "Brew Lite's Madhattan Four" with Martin Sasse on piano, Christian Ramond, and Marcus Rieck on drums.

Bruno Leicht is constantly working on new compositions for the two bands.

His new pieces include "Crossing Mails", "Big Noise In Rumble Lane", "Ballad Of The Big 15", "12 Hours Ahead" aka "Mad G Blues" aka "Magic Blues", "Lady L's Little Bloose", and "Goodbye Mr. Russell (an obituary in music, dedicated to composer George Russell).

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"Cool articulation, Bruno." — Dizzy Gillespie

"Ich habe Bruno Leicht als einen sehr ernsthaften, engagierten und vielseitig kreativen Musiker kennengelernt." - - Prof. Jiggs Whigham/ Hans Eisler Universität Berlin

Jazz journalist Marc Myers/ JazzWax about Bruno Leicht's former jazz blog:

"Bruno hosts a fabulous blog that's loaded with jazz insights and free music clips."

Primary Instrument

Trumpet

Location

Cologne

Willing to teach

Advanced only

Credentials/Background

Thelonious Monk didn't think in scales. You won't even find chord-symbols in his original scores. He was a "melody man", since he was mainly interested in the melody of a song and what you could do with it.

Besides that did he always try to express the sounds he heard swinging in himself. Some notes which would have belonged to a certain chord, he left off intentionally, and added others which weren't supposed to be there, and which would have been considered as "wrong" notes by most academic intellectuals.

"Blue Monk" was his favorite composition among the ca

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