(Photo: Collon/Dalle/Retna Ltd.)

The jazz event of the fall is Dave Douglas’s Festival of New Trumpet Music, which he first organized six years ago and co-curates with fellow horn players Taylor Ho Bynum, Jeremy Pelt, and John McNeil. “The trumpet gets typecast as the loudest instrument in the band,” says Douglas by phone from Croton-on-Hudson, where he’s lived since ditching Park Slope five years ago. Douglas and Roy Campbell, one of his first co-conspirators in font, began making a list of players who countered the stereotype and realized that there needed to be a forum for these more nuanced players. This year’s font runs from September 13 to 28, and, emblematic of a decentralized jazz scene, the concerts take place all over town—the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, bricStudio in Fort Greene, and several Manhattan jazz clubs. The music ranges from tributes to Armstrong and Woodstock-era jazz giant Woody Shaw to presentations by superstar soundtrack composer Mark Isham, and it features several commissions of new work by emerging trumpeters. “It’s the sort of thing that I wish someone had done for me,” says Douglas, “when I was coming up.”

Related:

• Archive: “Guides”
• Articles by Martin Johnson
• Table of Contents: Sep 1, 2008 issue of New York | Subscribe!