Trumpeter and composer Jeremy Pelt knew he wanted to be a professional musician by the third grade.
"If you'd ask my mother, she would tell you that all I did was eat, sleep, and drink music. That was it. So I mean, it was written in stars," he said.
Sure enough, by the time Pelt's band played a KNKX session at Dimitriou's Jazz Alley in 2023, he'd released two dozen albums and had been named Downbeat Magazine's Rising Star five years in a row.
For his show at Jazz Alley, Pelt's band included Jalen Baker on vibes, Alex Wintz on guitar, Leighton McKinley Harrell on bass, and Jared Spears on drums. Pelt honors his early mentors Ralph Peterson, Louis Hayes, Vincent Herring, and others by building his own band of rising stars.
"I'm older than everybody in my band by a spread of 12 to 28 years, but it's important for me to to be able to pass down things in a way that I think is helpful," said Pelt.
Pelt's band made him realize his own youth is behind him. He just turned 47 and was a little surprised to find himself in the position of the band's elder statesman.
"Clearly, I remember doing things, musical things, way before they were born, making records and whatnot. Then it starts to really stick in that, yeah, okay, I'm that person," he said.
Pelt's own career includes a lot of big band experience with Roy Hargrove, the Village Vanguard Orchestra, the Mingus Big Band, and more. Pelt sees ensemble experience as a crucial connection to jazz history.
"When you talk about Miles and Bird and Dizzy being in the bands of Billy Eckstein and Cab Calloway and all those, I felt like it was the right thing to do in order to learn how to be a band leader and how to blend with other instruments, and learn what you wanted from different people that were on the stage with you," he said. "It's an experience that you have to have."
Pelt doesn't actively model his playing or composing on his favorite musicians, but their influences inevitably make their way into everyone's music. He explained that copying your heroes has to eventually become part of a musician's own style. You've got to make art in your own way.
"There are some some early compositions that, even if I were to tell you what they were, it wouldn't sound exactly like what it's influenced by," Pelt said.
Pelt's love for his fellow musicians inspired him to capture their stories in a book series titled Griot. He's collected stories from Wayne Shorter, Christian McBride, Kenny Barron, and many more musicians he's worked with in his career. It's an oral history project that's become very personal to Pelt.
"Once I got fully immersed into the music and started to know and work with these people all the time, it just became something that I was even more and more so interested in because I'm so close to these people," he said.
As he collects and shares the legacy of jazz, Pelt is also writing his own musical story.
Songs heard in this episode:
- "Aesop's Fables"
- "...For Whom I Love So Much"
- "Be the Light"
