Trumpet prodigy Theo Croker talks about pleasing Chinese audiences, being the grandson of a legend and making a living doing what he loves - playing jazz

By James Roy

"He has the tools, the intelligence, the ability and the talents. The future looks bright for Croker." So said jazz superstar Wynton Marsalis about Theo Croker's abilities on the trumpet as a 16-year-old high school student. It doesn't hurt that he's also the grandson of legendary trumpeter Adolphus "Doc" Cheatham, from whom he seems to have inherited his musical gift. Croker, now 22, has impressed audiences and established greats alike with his playing in New York City, and now he is taking his act on the road. His band, the Theo Croker Sextet, has been playing in Shanghai for two months on the opening leg of an international sojourn. He sat down to tell EuroBiz about performing in China and what it means to be a musician in the digital age.

EB: How did you become a musician?

TC: My grandfather was a musician - he was a jazz trumpet player. He had a whole lineage. He was born in 1905 and he started working professionally in the '20s with, really, everybody - Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Billie Holliday - all the way up until 1997, when he died. So he had that whole scope of people that he worked with. I just wanted to play. But then, when I started to get real serious about it, all the people he had worked with that were still alive - he was like the link between the young people that are [playing] now and the old people - so he was that guy that they would go to. Then, when I came up, those were the people I would go to. They would take me in because he had taken them in. So people like Wynton Marsalis, Jimmy Heath and Frank Wess were very nurturing for me growing up. When you're a little kid you don't know anything about somebody being a famous jazz musician - it was just some really cool old guy that showed me a lot of cool [stuff] on the instrument - so it was really inspiring without me knowing what it's really about.

EB: When did you figure out that this was what you were going to do as a career?

TC: I was about 12, I think (laughs). I'd played for about a year and they did a memorial for my grandfather that was a 12-hour concert. People like Wynton, he would come and he would play, Nicholas Payton - really high-calibre people - would come by and play one song and leave. I heard so many great people, I was like 'Wow, this is what I want to do." Before I saw that, I thought it was just for fun.

EB: When did your album, Fundamentals, come out?

TC: That was recorded in July of 2006, and put out in January of '07. It's all independent. I've got two more in the can - that means two more ready to go. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them yet. I'm searching around for some record labels that are interested. I plan on maintaining my label [Left-Sided Records] for other artists. I'm trying to plug into the commercial world, and then use the resources from that to feed the real jazz, the real artists that are out there. So I'm trying to 'pop out' and use the funds from that to support the art. Kind of the opposite of what other jazz people do.

EB: How so?

TC: Most people just 'pop out' - like Kenny G, or Chris Bodie. At some point in time they wanted to play real jazz. Then they realised that this is too hard, which means they didn't want to do the work - because it's rigorous being a jazz musician, and I'm not getting paid very well for it, so they said 'I'm going to pop out' - meaning, 'I'm going to make money.' Playing whatever they tell me to play, and however - which is okay; there's nothing wrong with that. I'd love to do it ... but after a couple of years of that, I'd go back to playing music the way I want to play it and supporting people that want to do that. Cause I mean the integrity is there. The commercial aspect is the commercial aspect. That's going to change every week, and I think that's a mistake that a lot of people fall into.

EuroBiz: How hard is it being a musician with digital copies of everyone's music so readily available? Does playing gigs become a more important part of your livelihood?

Theo Croker: Definitely. There's a good and a bad side to the digital market. The good side is that anybody can do it. It allows everyone an equal opportunity to sell music - internet and all that. The bad side is that, since everyone can do it, the price of everything goes down. So it's 20 bucks for a record, but 99 cents for a song, and then after you pay the fees for selling your music you get 60 cents for a song. If you sell a million songs, it's great, but if you're selling 200 songs, it's not - it's not a lot of money. Jazz is usually just making your money off of gigs - that's really the best. You get paid, and then you sell a lot of CDs on your gig. If you sell 20, 30 CDs at a gig, you double what you make. So moving around, playing gigs - that's the lucrative part of it.

EB: So you're on iTunes, services like that?

TC: Yeah, iTunes, CDBaby, Amazon, Napster, all that stuff. Right along with everybody else (laughs).

EB: But the sound quality is worse than an LP?

TC: No, I mean, it's not that bad, but yeah if you're an audio nut you're going to hear the difference with an MP3, or even a wave file from the actual CD or the actual LP. Most people can't hear that, which is okay.

EB: What are some of the highlights of your career so far?

TC: Probably one of the best things I've done is work with the older people - cats like Jimmy Heath, the old tenor saxophonist in the bebop era. Working with someone who's 80, and has been doing this for 70 years of their life, it's just a whole different kind of energy and knowledge that they bring to it. Standing on stage with them, when it's your turn to play, what you play is so much more ... elevated.

EB: Do you play any instruments other than the trumpet?

TC: I play the piano, mostly for composition, though. A little bass - not enough to do in public! - and some drums. I try to mess with everything.

EB: What do you like so much about the trumpet?

TC: I could go on all day about the trumpet! It's the loudest instrument - it's louder than any other instrument on the bandstand. Except for the drums - the drums and the trumpet are really the same [level]. In African culture the griot - the storyteller - would play the drums and the trumpet. He'd blow the trumpet, and people would come around and he'd play the drums and tell a story. So there's that whole history going from elephant tusks or something going up to the trumpet we play now. That's very attractive to me. And then the brass of it, all the different sounds you can get out of it, all the great people that have played it - it's a very versatile instrument ... It has no limit. You can play as fast as you want, which is true of most instruments. But, for example, a saxophone has a button for every note for a certain amount of registers, and beyond that is something false that you're getting out of the horn. On the trumpet, the faster you can get the air to go, the higher you can go. So there are guys who can go eight, nine octaves if they want, up and down. There's no limit - one button can get you pretty much whatever note you want. That's the way it's built.

EB: How did you decide to come to China?

TC: Somebody that I know did a gig here and told me about it, and I found out the contact, I had an agent, and that was it. Let's go to China!

EB: What's the difference between a New York audience and a Shanghai audience?

TC: Shanghai audiences - especially Chinese people –like their music to be very intense, all night. We can't play anything slow, we can't play anything soft - no ballads. We play ballads when there are like three people there. But if you're not constantly engaging them with something that's exciting and dynamic, you'll lose them very quickly. They're not a sit-down-and-listen audience - not in a club, anyway. That was the biggest challenge for us - we were thinking, 'We're going to make the show climax here, slow down there …' - but they want it through the wall, all night. ... In New York, the audiences are smaller, maybe even a little more knowledgeable about the music. They want a much wider scope. Finding ways to make the music intense without playing loud and fast and hard is probably the most valuable thing we've learned playing in China. The Theo Croker Sextet plays at the House of Blues and Jazz in Shanghai, Tuesdays through Sundays from 9pm to 1am.