Jon Faddis

Jon Faddis astonished the jazz community upon his arrival as a teenager, displaying extraordinary technical command along with the capacity to mirror Dizzy Gillespie so closely that observers likened the two to identical twins—an achievement made more striking because no one had previously replicated Gillespie’s intricate approach. For a time this resemblance confined Faddis to the role of imitator, yet his exceptional range, which extended beyond anything Gillespie achieved, combined with the slow emergence of a personal voice, allowed him to move past that early limitation. He can now replicate Roy Eldridge and Louis Armstrong with comparable accuracy. Gillespie remained Faddis’s guiding influence from the moment he began playing trumpet at age eight. Following his relocation to New York in the early 1970s, Faddis performed with Lionel Hampton and Charles Mingus, stepping in on a live recording with the bassist after Roy Eldridge fell ill, and he completed two notable Pablo sessions, one of them a duet date with Oscar Peterson. Brief appearances alongside Gillespie followed, though their strongest mid-1970s collaborations went unrecorded; afterward Faddis withdrew from view, concentrating on studio work and the lead trumpet chair in the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. His return in the mid-1980s brought recordings for Concord and Epic, and in 1993 he was appointed musical director of the Carnegie Hall Jazz Orchestra. Teranga appeared on Koch in 2006.