I’ve been posting a lot about Wycliffe Gordon lately, partly because I recently had the opportunity to back him up in concert, but mostly because he’s a great trombonist. I got emailed the link to this video and was asked about what I thought of what’s happening with Wycliffe’s chops at 4:10 into it.
You get a few good looks at his embouchure in this video. His setting is very stable, with very little excess motion. This makes it hard to spot his embouchure motion, but I think I can see some examples of it in there (could be my confirmation bias, but I’ve noted his embouchure motion in person close up, so I’m pretty certain it’s down to ascend, up to descend). One interesting exception happens around 4:00 into the video. About 4:07 he takes the mouthpiece off to lick his lips and then resets just before he pastes a double Eb! The rest that follows is only speculation.
I don’t think Wycliffe is using this to reset his mouthpiece placement to a different position on the lips here. Some players do that for extreme ranges, sometimes to just a slightly different setting and sometimes completely switching embouchure types. While the placement does look a bit lower for the Eb, I suspect that this is just his downward embouchure motion pulling his lips down. First, he descends down from there and his timbre is consistently the same as before. Usually a change in setting has a noticeable effect on the tone, which I don’t hear (although it could be the recording isn’t enough to bring it out). Secondly, Wycliffe plays into that extreme upper register all the time, often going from very low notes very quickly. If he was resetting the mouthpiece to a different placement for the high notes in this video, he doesn’t seem to need to usually.
Thanks to Paul for spotting this video and sending me the link. It’s got a nice look at a trombonist’s embouchure and is some great playing too.
Hi, Dave.
I just saw Wycliffe again recently, and was reminded of this discussion. I haven’t been able to find any better videos of his playing, but saw a few pictures which show very clearly the embouchure formation I’ve observed in person when he ascends into the upper tessitura of his range.
Does what we can see in these pictures fit your conclusions, or not? I’ll be curious to hear more of your thoughts on this. Does Wycliffe “switch types” at the top of his range, or is this normal behaviour for a Medium High Placement player at the very top of his range?
A good view of placement (when he is rather on the low side, probably in the upper register):
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
A few shots of the kind of technique I’ve seen him adopt in the extreme upper register:
Link 1 (very small, but the posture may be an indicator)
Link 2
Link 3