Trumpet Players with Music Gifts
Trumpet Players: Paul Brody on Adam Stinga
"Eight Countries, Six Languages, Two Trumpet Players, One Band"
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________In 2013 Adam Stinga, one of the greatest trumpet soloists of our generation, was told by doctors of the Republic of Moldavia that he would survive his lung cancer but never perform again. Less then a year later, I was standing next to Adam on stage in Warsaw with the band the brought us the together as a trumpet section, Alan Bern’s The Other Europeans.The story of Adam’s treatment and recovery parallels the story of our band, individuals from different cultures working together to find a common language.The Other Europeans is a fourteen piece group consisting of some of the most accomplished Klezmer and Roma musicians today. (Roma is the correct word for people often mistakenly called Gypsies.) We explore the intersection of two kinds of music that shared a rich cultural exchange before they were almost destroyed by war, the Holocaust, and immigration. We are from eight different countries, share no single language, and our rehearsals bounce among Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, German. English and French.Enjoy an introduction to their sound in this video. Trumpet Players Paul Brody (left) and Adam Stinga (right) stand side by side. With the help of the manager of a German pop star who heard the band play at Yiddish Summer Weimar, Alan Bern found one of the world’s leading lung cancer surgeons, an Albanian doctor based in Germany, and brought Adam in for an examination. Instead of removing an entire lung, the surgeon would use a technique he developed which involves removing only a small part of Adam’s lung and reconstructing that with Adam’s own tissue. The doctor agreed to work for a minimal cost and invited his best team, which consisted of an Egyptian anesthesiologist and Turkish nurses. Adam’s Moldavian insurance wouldn’t pay treatment out of the country so Alan Bern set up an online fundraising campaign, prompting musicians from all over the world to give concerts and solicit donations.I used to play more quietly than Adam out of admiration, shy respect. Now I play softly out of joy. Like watching the path of a humming bird flying though tree branches, my ear follows his Moldavian embellishments winding through melodies. Maybe he takes a few more breaths between phrases than before his operation, but I still have the feeling that every note from his silver horn is music history in the making.My listening has changed entirely with the realization that this sound could have disappeared from our group, and what put Adam back on stage with The Other Europeans strangely mirrors the band itself: crossing country borders despite difficulties, an improbable array of culturally diverse people working together, every one of whom would have been considered a ‘non-person’ just two generations ago in Germany.What Clark Terry is to jazz and Maurice Andre is to classical, Adam Stinga is to Roma music. And while carrying a trumpet on one’s back is a fairly light endeavor, the tradition that we represent while playing, from how we climb a scale and trill to the very sound coming from our breath is a full world. Despite the surge in popularity in Balkan brass bands and Roma music, there is still much to discover by listening to Adam Stinga. (www.theothereuropeans.eu)Paul Brody
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