By Chris Slawecki

The seventh annual Berks County Jazz Festival will take place in Reading and Berks County (PA) this coming March 19 through March 23, with nearly fifty performances scheduled from lunchtime Wednesday to Sunday Night's "Grand Finale," which will feature Bela Fleck & The Flecktones with pianist Bruce Horsnby as special guest.

For trumpet player Rick Braun, playing the Berks County Jazz Festival is more than just another relaxed festival gig. Coming to Berks County means coming home for Braun, who was born "next door" in Allentown, PA, in neighboring Lehigh County.

Braun will participate in the "Jazz Jam Session" Wednesday night (with Gerald Veasley, John Blake, Butch Reed and others), and will headline "WJJZ Smooth Jazz Saturday" along with Avenue Blue featuring Jeff Golub. Other scheduled performers include Patti Austin with Alex Bugnon, the Royal Crown Revue, Lee Ritenour, Spyro Gyra, Charles Earland, Bob James with Kirk Whalum, Joaquin Lievano, Dianne Reeves and blues guitar legend Buddy Guy (for more information, call 1-888-MUSIC06).

Braun's last album, Beat Street (Mesa / Blue Moon), topped the smooth jazz / adult alternative album chart for thirteen weeks, and garnered the trumpet player the 1995 "Artist of the Year" in that format from the radio trade magazine Gavin. Taking funk and soul as its starting point, Beat Street gallops and sways astride congenial, uncomplicated, riff-heavy backing tracks in support of solos from Braun and guests (saxophonist Boney James on "Groovis," and guitarists Jeff Golub from Avenue Blue on "Cadillac Slim" and "Philadelphia," and Peter White on the evocative "Club Harlem"); it's not really fair to call them mere "backing tracks," because the instrumental interplay between the soloists and the supple rhythm section -- various combinations of bassists Dave Marotta, Jack Daro and Cliff Hugo, pianists Curtis Brengle and Matt Harris, and drummers Dave Palmer and Dave Karasony -- is so sophisticated yet quite warm and funky.

"This is definitely a more spontaneous recording than anything I've done before," Braun has reflected on Beat Street. "Instead of sitting in a room by myself, composing the music before going into the studio, I just took my inspiration from a bunch of guys getting together and playing, with no idea of what we were going to come up with."

Braun will soon issue the first single ("Notorious") from his forthcoming new album, which will be named after its cover version of the jazz standard "Body And Soul." Over the telephone from Los Angeles, in between his producer duties for both the new Willie & Lobo and Jeff Golub / Avenue Blue albums, he reflects on the professional road which has led him, for one weekend at least, right back home.

Is the area where you were born reflected at in the music we hear from you today?

"Definitely. I think that the fact that there was a strong music program in my school and I played a brass instrument in the brass band and the concert band, are a big part of what goes on in Allentown they have the summer band festival kind of stuff, concerts in the park and things like this. It was just a really good place to grow up to be a musician. A lot of good musicians came from, maybe not from the Allentown area that are that well-known, but from the Eastern side of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia area especially with the Brecker Brothers and all of them."

Is that why there's a track on the album called "Philadelphia"?

"I just wanted to call a song "Philadelphia" because Philadelphia was a big part of my learning to play trumpet. I went down to Philadelphia to study trumpet with Seymour Rosenfeld who was in the Philadelphia Orchestra, so I was down in Philadelphia every weekend taking trumpet lessons in my last year of high school. It was something that I wanted to do, to write a song as kind of a tribute to that part of my life."

Where did you come up with "Xoum Ladya Phada" as a song sub-title? Does it translate into something else?

"It is untranslatable. If you listen to the song "Promises", it's just a sound that my friend who did all the vocals on that came up with, kind of like the "Sui-sui-suidio" Phil Collins kind of thing. I asked my friend Fred White, who did all the vocals on the album, to come up with a sound that was African and, being an African - American, he came up with this whole thing. This was the sound that he came up with for that song, and I sort of phonetically spelled it out. The song isn't actually called "Xoum Ladya Phada" -- I was going to call it that, but I figured that no one would be able to have a clue what that's all about."

There's a pretty powerful statement in your record company bio, that you take your stylistic cue from "such post-bop luminaries as Miles Davis and Chet Baker." That's a pretty weighty tag for a trumpet player to bear, isn't it?

"I don't think anybody could take exception to being compared to, to even being mentioned in the same sentence with the sort of people like that -- Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Lee Morgan, Clark Terry -- all of these people were legends. But these are things that people have said about me, it's not that my record company made this claim."

"And I think that what happens is, in the most simple sense, the sound of what I do IS the trumpet. There's a lot of trumpet in what I do, as in Miles Davis as well as in Chet Baker, and so on the most basic level that sound is how I am going to remind people of that. And I think the fact that I have some be-bop influence in my playing, I have studied that style and I enjoy playing be-bop and I enjoy listening to it (John Coltrane's Ballads CD is one of the few CDs that I listen to right now, and it has been for years) probably people are hearing some of that in my playing."

"Whereas in the contemporary format there are some people who are NOT inspired by those kinds of people, they're more inspired by more blues-oriented players. Clifford Brown was also one of my major influences; I remember hearing Clifford Brown with Max Roach on "A Night In Tunisia". Clifford Brown was one my main influences as far as trumpet is concerned as well."

I was just exposed to "The Blue Note Best of" compilation by trumpeter Kenny Dorham, and the more I listened to it the more I thought that he was one of the best trumpet players that I had never heard, or rarely even heard other people talk about. Is there a contemporary that YOU might call an unappreciated jazz musician today?

"I don't really know, as far as I don't know what 'unappreciated' is. When you think about jazz music being such a small percentage as far as the reach and fame of someone like U2 or Sting, or a major pop artist, jazz artists are never going to have this sort of recognition because of the nature of the art. It's the type of music -- especially the type of jazz that you're talking about -- I mean, Miles Davis was a major success, yet he still, in the overall scheme of music, never reached the sort of success of a pop artist."

"And I don't think that 'unappreciated' is really something that happens to a great musician who sticks with it. Eventually the cream floats to the top, eventually people get their due recognition, but as a jazz artist. We have to realize this. It's really a much smaller listening audience, especially in the United States, which is kind of sad because jazz as well as blues are probably true American art forms in music. But jazz is much more appreciated in Europe and Japan. People just aren't trained to listen to it here, for whatever reason. Maybe schools just don't take the time to let people know, or to expose them to it, for whatever reason."

Would you please further illuminate one of your own quotes: "I'm a jazz player, but coming from a pop background helps keep my music accessible."

"Well, I think if you're going to play any instrument over something, there has to be a foundation for you to play over. And the foundation that I choose to play over is a little bit more structured than, say, going out and playing a Pat Metheny song, which kind of evolves over the course of ten or fifteen minutes. I chose to evolve things over a period that more closely relates to the form of a pop-oriented song. Most often, I think of things as developing out of a verse-chorus structure."

"And where that comes from, I was a songwriter for Warner Chappel as a pop song writer. And I've had some success as a pop songwriter as well; I've written a Top Twenty song (note: "Here With Me," done by REO Speedwagon) and had a couple of singles cut."

Some of your sideman experience includes work with Sade and Rod Stewart, but I wanted to ask you about your association with Crowded House.

"I played on their first record, I believe it was called "Crowded House." I got involved as part of a horn section, I was playing with Jack Mack & The Heart Attack, which was an LA-based band. And we got a lot of work -- back then, you either had the Tower of Power horns play on your record, or the Jerry Hey horns, or Jack Mack & The Heart Attack play on your record. I played on, I think, two or three songs on that album."

Do you really look at the upcoming Jazz Festival as your musical homecoming?

"Yeah, I do. It's a lot of fun coming back home. My family gets to come out, my mom's turning 80 this year and so this is a real treat for me to come home and play for her and my family and, you know, a lot of people that I haven't seen for years surface for this show, people I went to junior high school with and elementary school it's really good. Plus, the whole atmosphere is so it's just a really good format. Everybody really, really loves it, and it's nice for me to know that there's such a big fan base for contemporary jazz in my hometown area. It makes you feel good."

What would you most like for people to take away from this interview?

"Well, I am just really grateful that I can do what I love for a living. I still consider myself a very fortunate man to be able to get out and have one of my dreams that I kinda let go of quite a long time ago sort of come around to where I can go do this for a living. And I just want to say thanks, you know, to all the people who come out and support me. That's really where I'm at."