[Below, click Play button to begin Marsalis: Trumpet Concerto in E Flat Major: I – Allegro (Haydn) . While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 6:20 long.]

These days the man concentrates, as far as I can tell, exclusively on jazz (recording, playing, mentoring, producing). But my first exposure to him was through his recordings of classical music.

Of course, I’d already decided to like trumpet — cf., the “Midweek Music Break” on Herb Alpert of a few weeks ago. But I can no longer remember how I stumbled on this Marsalis album. (He won a Grammy both for it and for a jazz release in 1983 — the first artist to pull that off.) I didn’t (as far as I know) know anyone who listened to classical music, and knew (know) almost nothing about it myself. Still, I loved it from his first note.

Sometimes, I like to imagine music as the soundtrack for a scene in a movie. In this case (Haydn’s Concerto in E Flat Major: I – Allegro), Marsalis’s trumpet — that instrument at once so bright, so sharp, so soft, so unambigous — seems to tell the story of some master artisan or craftsman who takes complete, speechless joy in every second spent with his avocation. Even the little off-the-script Marsalis improvisation which begins at about 5:05 or so, leading to the piece’s conclusion — even that seems to capture such a person in a flight of free-association fantasy as he stands back to consider how to add one last touch to his handiwork.

If you like it, too, feel free to enjoy the second (andante) and third (allegro) movements of the same concerto:

Look at that baby face in the album cover. That album’s liner notes, from a 1982 Newsweek profile called “Young Man with a Horn,” included this commentary about his jazz playing:

The most memorable appearance at the 1978 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival was the most unexpected–a skinny kid with glasses and a trumpet who ambled onstage one day during the mid-afternoon lull, hiked up his horn and blew the top off the jazz tent. One minute he sounded like Dizzy Gillespie, unleashing torrents of sixteenth notes at blinding speed. The next he throttled down into the middle register in an imitation of Miles Davis cool: whoever this local kid was, he was going places.

He was all of twenty-one years of age when this album (his first classical one, and just his third overall) came out. Precocious much?