Community Spotlight: Ashlin Parker and Trumpet Mafia

Next in the PHF Community Spotlight series: Ashlin Parker explores New Orleans and its love for jazz, the early days of his ensemble Trumpet Mafia, and experiences as a college music professor.

Interview and photos by Katie Sikora

You are originally from North Carolina. When did you come to New Orleans?

“2007. I came for the music obviously but I accepted a scholarship and a teaching assistantship funded by the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation and University of New Orleans. That got me right into the teaching world. I have been an adjunct there for twelve years.”

And you’re also teaching at Tulane University?

“Yeah, I am full-time at Tulane and I just accepted a position of Professor of Practice in the Black American Music Studies department—the first one.”

What does it feel like to be a part of a brand-new department?

“It feels like I don’t have to make excuses for inclusion to be ok. Now we can play Stevie Wonder and not have the jazz police on my back. Someone can now rap using the same rhythms as all the other stuff that’s in this music. It’s really bizarre to me that our two spectrums for going to school for music are classical music and the jazziest jazz of jazzy jazz. It’s so Westernized that it doesn’t really work. Someone can have a Master’s degree in music and not know how to play any American music, it’s crazy.”

You and I met a few weeks before the very first Trumpet Mafia Jazz Fest performance. I remember a lot of the raw energy of being in the room for those rehearsals. What do you remember from that first year?

“It was a lot of moving parts and a lot of personalities. There were a lot of over-expectations on my part about what exactly we could accomplish and how. Initially, I could not get everyone into one round table but after so many gigs, there are the people who have kept showing up and help bring ideas to fruition. I thought we were going to burn everybody out but I found that if we keep the structure simple then there is more room for the ‘in the moment’ stuff. I literally don’t know where it’s going and that’s great. I have never had an end game for this thing. I know that there’s some things that we do that we need to show that we can do. We can tribute the hell out of 120 years of trumpet music from this city and beyond. We have a collective experience of 1000 years or some shit like that. There’s a lot of musical information there. I can do stuff, somebody else can do different stuff, and we’re all doing stuff we wouldn’t be doing if we weren’t up there sharing the space together. The liminality going on in the Trumpet Mafia is something I never want to put a cap on. It’s like a tree that is starting to branch out around the world. One fantasy of mine is to have Trumpet Mafia Tuesdays but all over the world.”

It's fascinating to think that you are just as curious as someone on the outside to see where this thing goes…

“Absolutely. That’s why we didn’t make a website or jump on Facebook. It’s not centralized—by design. To have one voice speaking for the Trumpet Mafia does not work. I know what we can do and that’s cool but I also don’t know all the impacts that we can actually have.”

Can you recall the early days of Trumpet Mafia? How did it come to be?

“It started as a practice group that got together with the common goal of becoming better trumpet players. We came together every morning at 10am and practiced together until at least four or five and then people went straight to their gigs. And we did that for about three months every day. At a certain point we started doing exercises together and in harmony and discovered that we actually sounded good. We didn’t think of ourselves as a performance group until then and we started flash mobbing friends’ gigs and eventually we got a name for doing such. In the early days, we relied on heavy rehearsing and heavy arrangements, trying to get everybody a part. But we’ve noticed since then that because of the size of the band, it’s extremely expensive and difficult to rehearse this band. So now we’ve worked out a way to rehearse everybody individually and see what we can come up with on the spot more often.” 

What do you think the connection between Trumpet Mafia and New Orleans is? Do you think it would look different if its inception had been in a different place?

“Yes. It’s just like jazz. Could it have been created somewhere else? I don’t think so. I think the soil here has a certain fertility that creates things like jazz. We are raw and we are dynamic. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to define what Trumpet Mafia is and we are a lot of things but at the end of the day we are a global network of help centered in New Orleans. We are stronger together.” 

Not long after the shutdown, you received a Community Engagement Grant from the Preservation Hall Foundation. What did that grant money make possible for you at that point in the pandemic?

“It was a financial boost that definitely inspired me to keep people engaged. Most of the trumpet players I know hadn’t played any gigs at all until we organized some Trumpet Mafia endeavors. That money helped put a security blanket under those gigs. But I also bought a sewing machine and started making everybody masks and got them out to a lot of people. Early on it was really hard to get masks and we got out around 300 masks.”

What has it been like to not play live for so long? What have you been doing the last year and a half?

“There was definitely cabin fever. I am usually traveling a lot and initially it was kind of nice. But then it was the same zip code, same places to eat, over and over. Artistically, I’ve been in a motivational crisis. Music is not a thing that you can just stop and then come back to. If I had stopped, I don’t think I would be a musician now. So I made sure—even if was via safe, clandestine, outdoor gigs and rehearsals—that we were still playing.”

What were the challenges in trying to keep you and your colleagues motivated?

“Practice for what? Traditionally, we practice to perform. If there’s no performance, it’s hard to practice just to get better. It’s bizarre. We’re already kind of crazy to sit in a practice room for hours and hours hoping for someone to love it someday. It was hard to be about that. Like everyone else, we had time to reflect and slow down from playing gig after gig. I went from almost 300 hundred club dates in a year to living check to check and thinking check to check. I stopped practicing for months and shed the desire to be the best trumpet player. I re-evaluated and saw there are other things I can be. There are other things. It was kind of nice to not be diving into the depths of my abilities and assessing myself under such a narrow microscope.”

Did you have anything in particular that helped you cope and navigate that pivot? 

“The funny thing is that with the tools that I had, I had been trying to teach my students about core drives and motivations. Grab something new or something you have some dissonance with and be trash at something for a little bit. But when Ellis passed, I went into a whole other zone. It was different. When there is a disaster in a particular domain, it puts to the test all these different ideas we think about. I went from a hardcore left brain to a hardcore right brain. The tools I had initially did not help me at all because we were in a disaster.”

You talk a lot about the idea of liminality. How do you put those principles to work in your own life?

“I am doing a tight rope walk as far as where I spend my time and my energy. I put myself in liminal spaces more than I live a liminal life. I don’t do drugs or sky dive. I don’t rock climb. I don’t put myself in thrill-seeking situations. But I find myself in spaces that provide some comfort but also a fair amount of discomfort and a certain level of anxiety. Bringing that into music, the spaces I put myself in are going to be at the edge of what I do know versus what I don’t know. I am not necessarily concerned about demonstrating everything I know because I’d like to get into the unknown. That’s where growth is and that’s where invention lies. In teaching, they never know what the hell each class is going to bring. And that probably brings anxiety but that’s the thing about liminal spaces: they are anxiety-inducing. Anxiety is just a fancy word for confusion so if you keep on making excuses at things and people and spaces that confuse you, you won’t get better at it. It’s uncomfortable. I am comfortable being uncomfortable. Sometimes you have tools for it, sometimes you don’t, but the whole point is growth and trying to better the human condition.” 

For more information on the PHF Community Engagement Grant and its outstanding 2020 awardees, read more HERE and explore more of the Community Spotlight profiles by local correspondents at Salon726.com.