September 18, 2024
Doug Woolverton’s Modern Blues Mastery
One of contemporary blues’ premier horn players on transcribing guitarists, controlling his sound with effects pedals, and using open space like B.B. King.
The first time that trumpeter Doug Woolverton played with guitarist Warren Haynes, at a gig by Haynes’ Southern jam band Gov’t Mule, he participated in a kind of trial by fire. Haynes, a masterful improviser who spent more than 20 years in the Allman Brothers Band, wanted to spotlight his guest trumpet player, so he posed a question: Do you want to solo on the first part of this next tune, or the second part?
Both sections were in keys not terribly comfortable for trumpeters—“but,” as Woolverton explains, “you have to know all your keys.” He chose the first solo, out of respect. “It was Warren’s gig,” he says, “and I wanted him to finish it off.”
After Woolverton had taken his solo, Haynes started in on his. “And he looks at me,” Woolverton recalls, “which was not expected. And we did what the guitar players do, where they’re playing back and forth. He just smiled at me and we did this round robin.
“My advice [for blues] would be to play one note. Hold it out. Play that really good note that makes you feel good.”
“And that’s what I practiced for,” Woolverton continues. “I was ready for that moment, because I’d been practicing for that for many, many years. Because the trumpet’s a leading instrument, and the guitar’s a leading instrument.”
In many ways, the Maryland-based trumpeter has made his fantastic career out of playing his trumpet like a guitar and among guitars. He’s one of the premier brass players on the contemporary blues and blues-rock scenes, with an enviable résumé: a decade carrying the torch for swing and jump-blues with five-time Grammy nominees Roomful of Blues; eight years with keyboardist-vocalist Victor Wainwright, including recording on the Grammy-nominated Victor Wainwright and the Train; and his current gig as part of multi-platinum blues-rocker Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s band. Along the way, he’s performed with Aretha Franklin, recorded with jazz great John Scofield and shared stages with a who’s who of the blues.
Recently, Woolverton sat down with Music & Arts’ Mark Gauthier for a full-length video interview, to discuss his life in music, his advice for aspiring players and his trumpet, the Blessing BTR-1660.
In retrospect, Woolverton’s niche as a go-to trumpeter for blues heavyweights makes perfect sense. The blues is a genre that ranks soul and feel above theoretical learning, and Woolverton taught himself to play while growing up in Trenton, N.J. He was raised in a musical family where everyone played or sang, but he learned by ear and through playing along to records. His ears were (and are) extraordinary: Somehow, he made it through high-school concert and jazz band without reading music. Without drawing too much attention, he’d tap his sectionmates for a demonstration of the parts and learn them that way.
When it came time for his college audition, at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota, Woolverton still couldn’t read music. “They put the music in front of me,” he recalls, “and I’m like, ‘I can’t read.’ You could hear the breath in the room—like, what?”
The faculty were generous. Woolverton had doubled on bass guitar, his first instrument, and the school’s jazz band needed a bass player. So he was able to study as a bass major while working with a trumpet teacher, Dr. Grant Manhart, who essentially helped him learn his instrument anew. It was a long, hard, slow-going process that included rebuilding his embouchure. As Woolverton was listening hard to jazz trumpet legends like Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard, he was simply trying to make a sound. “I could play like two notes my freshman year,” he says, “an octave and a half my sophomore year, and then junior, senior year, things started getting much better.” Much better, indeed: In the collegiate National Trumpet Competition, where hundreds of classical honorees were chosen but only seven jazz students, Woolverton made the jazz cut.
Today, to hear Doug Woolverton is to hear a complete musician, with the ear and feel to play excellent blues alongside the education to work as a first-call brass player. Sometimes, as when he got a last-minute call to back Aretha, those two musical brains work together perfectly. On that night, Woolverton found himself sight-reading charts without a sound check; some of those charts, like “Respect,” were so road-worn they were missing chunks of music. So Woolverton had to rely on all his years of listening and jamming to the blues and R&B. “I want to be a musician who could show up and hit it out of the park,” he says, “like I had been playing in that band for her entire life.”
We recently caught up with Woolverton to gather some tips for playing great modern blues and blues-rock trumpet.
Transcribe Guitar Players
To improvise like a blues master, it helps to transcribe the blues masters. And since hardcore blues is a largely guitar-focused genre, Woolverton unpacked solos by B.B. King, Albert Collins, Albert King, Freddie King, Stevie Ray Vaughan and others. Compared to the trumpet, the guitar has nearly a full additional octave, so every lick didn’t come easy. But Woolverton learned a lesson in powerful simplicity by unraveling stinging blues-guitar leads one bar at a time. In contrast to the swing, advanced harmony and snaking eighth-note lines of bebop, his blues playing uses rhythm, texture and open space in a way that makes his solos both more digestible and more dramatic. “We all love B.B. King,” he says. “Just the space he plays in a solo: Play a couple notes, take a break.”
“We all love B.B. King. Just the space he plays in a solo: Play a couple notes, take a break.”
Playing atop 12-bar shuffles night after night, Woolverton learned how the most fundamental concepts—vibrato, volume, repeated phrases—can bring a house down. Sometimes, he explains, all it takes is a single B.B.-strength note. “Blues is a very emotional music,” he says. “So where the jazz approach would be to play a lot of notes, my advice [for blues] would be to play one note. Hold it out. Play that really good note that makes you feel good.” And when you start adding notes, your end goal should be a singable melody, even if it’s based in the simple harmonic language of the blues.
Who Else Is in the Band?
The range that Woolverton chooses for his solos in different bands correlates directly to the instrumentation he’s playing with and against. “What is a good tonal range to stay in when you’re improvising a solo?” he says. “I notice when I’m with Kenny, I’m in a different harmony. I see myself playing higher than I would if I were playing behind an organist or the keyboard player, because their harmonic series is a little bit lower.”
Play a Chordal Instrument Too
Essentially, if Woolverton didn’t double on the electric bass, he wouldn’t be such a terrific trumpeter. He played the instrument at school and in his father’s band growing up, and his work on it enhanced his understanding of harmony, song form, rhythm … pretty much everything. “’Cause who am I listening to? In every band, the bass player,” he says. “The bass player makes or breaks any band.”
Play the Style. Don’t Play at the Style
As a musician, Woolverton contains multitudes. He started playing trumpet at 7, and his first inspiration was Louis Armstrong and traditional New Orleans jazz. Later, he studied classical and modern jazz, all the while nurturing his love of blues, rock, funk and reggae. Woolverton considers the blues to be his “home base,” as it is for all American music, but he believes the only way a player can sound authentic in a given musical context is to have truly explored it. It’s an insight he gleaned through a phone call from a musical hero, Dave Matthews Band trumpeter and arranger Rashawn Ross.
“We all learn jazz and classical,” Ross told Woolverton. He continues, paraphrasing Ross’ advice from memory: “When the jazz guys were locking themselves in a practice room, learning every tune, I also learned the tunes, but I wanted to learn blues and rock and funk and reggae and all this other amazing music. When I’m hired, I want to sound like I’ve been listening to that music all my life. I want to show up playing like a blues musician or a rock musician; I don’t want to sound like a jazz artist playing a blues gig or a rock gig.”
Technology Is Your Friend
Woolverton’s graduate school was Roomful of Blues, the Rhode Island institution where he learned the ins and outs of ’40s-style jump and swing. Further, he recommends that players study the entirety of blues history, from country blues to Texas, Memphis and Chicago blues and beyond. “There’s a style, and the way the shuffle is,” Woolverton says, “is going to determine how I’m playing.”
But Woolverton is foremost a player for the times, and blues in 2024 often means a stage setup fit for a hard-rock band. So how does a trumpeter compete on a rock soundstage alongside guitar and bass speaker cabs and mic’d-up drums? By joining the party and using technology. In fact, without it a trumpeter can get into trouble. “As a trumpet player, if you try to fight the sound of amplification, you can do a lot of physical damage,” says Woolverton. “You’ll overblow the air. You can physically hurt the muscles in your mouth. It’s a dangerous situation.”
The trumpeter has long been faithful to the Shure BETA 98H/C clip-on condenser mic, which he uses with a Shure ULXP wireless receiver. With the clip-on, Woolverton’s sense of dynamics comes directly from his training, especially the orchestral experience he gained in school, rather than by leaning into or away from a microphone stand.
He plugs the Shure receiver into his pedalboard, where it functions as a preamp. In the way of texture and sonics, Woolverton fell in love with Miles Davis’ mute sound, and he knows his way around a copper Harmon mute. But he’s also spent dedicated time learning to control his electronic effects—again, Woolverton is a trumpeter with the heart of a guitar god. “That’s kind of always been my [thing],” he says. “What would a guitar player do?”
His board begins with a vintage Cry Baby Wah, which leads to an MXR Bass Envelope Filter that Woolverton uses for a funk sound. Next comes a Boss Harmonist, which adds an octave beneath his playing, fattening up his section parts. Still more pedals follow: an MXR Carbon Copy for delay, a TC Electronic Hall of Fame Reverb, a TC Electronic Flashback Delay and, last but not least, his “sweetest pedal,” a Boss GE-7 Equalizer. “[For] trumpet, it’s all about EQ,” Woolverton says. “I want [my trumpet] to sound big, not thin. So if I need a little bit more on a gig, in my ears or if I need to send a little bit more to the front of house, I can do that with that pedal.” Ultimately, pedals give Woolverton a sense of hands-on control over his amplified sound—again, much like electric guitarists enjoy. “We don’t have a volume knob on our acoustic instruments,” he laughs.
Don’t Be Ashamed of Licks
Every jazz student has heard this advice or some variation of it, like a mantra: Don’t play licks, because licks and tricks aren’t real improvisation. Woolverton recalls his mentor and teacher coming to hear him on a blues gig and commenting, “The licks sound great.” Ouch.
But familiar phrases, or those that rely on dynamics and rhythm as opposed to harmonic sophistication, are often the stuff that thrills a crowd. And the blues is, more than anything, entertainment that soothes the soul. “Performing is so much … it’s not [about] me, it’s about everybody listening and what’s going to capture the attention and be talked about and have them come back to another show,” says Woolverton. “I want to play something that’s so smack-you-in-the-face in a great way, energy-wise, that it’s captivating.”
