Mississippi Symphony Orchestra Principal Trombonist Jude Morris, now in his third season, steps into the Thalia Mara Hall spotlight for the first time as the centerpiece draw of the Masterworks concert ‘Monumental Elegance’ on November 7.
Morris will be featured in George Walker’s pioneering 1957 Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra in an evening that also includes two German works from the Romantic Era — Carl Maria von Weber’s 1825 Oberon Overture and Johannes Brahms’ 1884 Symphony No. 4.
Of growing up with a musical family in the North Dallas city of Frisco, Morris said, of let me do whatever and go the way the wind took me.”
The wind blew him first toward playing the trumpet. “That’s what my dad did. My mom played trumpet… and French horn and we had a trumpet in the household that was my great grandad’s.”
Morris messed around with it for a bit, but a meet-the-instruments program in fifth grade turned his head in another direction. “They were like, ‘You should play trombone,’ I think mostly just because I’m tall.
“That’s what worked out and I think it is a good fit for me. It’s a good instrument — a lot of stuff to do, too.”
Playing jazz and the genre’s vast repertoire for jazz trombone got him thinking about music as a career. “That’s mainly the whole reason I started practicing at all, honestly, because that stuff’s fun to play….
“Orchestra is obviously awesome,” he said, “but the jazz stuff is more like what I listen to and that’s what piqued my interest.”
His involvement in Texas All-State Band, All-State Symphony Orchestra and All-State Jazz II in high school was also formative. At the end of his sophomore year, he and a half dozen other All-State student musicians from his district did a collaboration with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra musicians, playing a few pieces at a DSO concert.
“I got to play side-by-side with actual professionals… of probably one of the top 10 orchestras in the country.
“That was really an eye-opener, hearing them play and they’re having so much fun.” He saw a good environment where musicians loved what they were doing.
Morris studied with Scott Hartman of the Empire Brass at the Yale School of Music and Per Brevig of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra at the Manhattan School of Music. His brass quintet, Elm City Brass, represented Yale internationally, and he scored international competition wins for solo and ensemble performance at I.W.B.C. in Hartford.
Morris is also Principal Trombonist with the New Hampshire Symphony and Second Trombonist with the Tuscaloosa Symphony.
The Walker concerto he’ll perform in MSO’s “Monumental Elegance” concert is one he performed, just with a pianist, at his graduate recital at Yale in January 2025.
He has been slowly working on this piece, starting with his former teacher at Manhattan School of Music for whom it is a favorite, for four or five years now, he said.
“It’s interesting. The first movement is very angular. It’s kind of more aggressive and really kind of jumpy and difficult. But also, there’s a lot of really beautiful moments that come out of a lush orchestral background.… It’s a nice healthy balance of that aggression and these really beautiful sounds and nice, long phrases and melodies.”
He noted the work’s many different influences that can be heard in spots, from Stravinsky to spirituals.
“There is a lot of power in it, but it also has these melodic lines. I don’t really think that there’s another instrument that would be able to showcase in the specific way that [Walker] writes,” Morris said, with tone color changes, bright passages, then nice and supple phrases. “Not as many instruments have that flexibility.”
The second movement is more subdued and really pretty, but it, too, gets jumpy. “I think it crosses two and a half to three octaves… from the lowest spot to one of the highest notes that I’ll play in the piece,” Morris said. The third is more playful but can get tricky with offbeat accents.
The work’s fast-moving and complicated lines and jumps are not the easiest. “But it definitely showcases what the instrument can do.”
This is Morris’ first major work with the big orchestra. He was happy when MSO Conductor Crafton Beck presented the opportunity and pushed for this concerto by Walker, who was the first African American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.