Hi Alex - I just caught up with this thread again, and wanted to chime in on Dizzy, being a professional brass player myself. Everything Frogman has said is true, and he explains it about as well as it can be explained to a layman. Dizzy was self-taught, and quite frankly had a terrible embouchure (the way we shape our mouths and the muscles around it to play) - in fact, he is very often used as the textbook example of how not to form an embouchure - any beginning brass player is told not to look like that while playing, with the cheeks all puffed out like he did - this is extremely inefficient - the air is bunching up in his cheeks and is not getting into the instrument, hence the thin sound Frogman accurately described (and there are plenty of other problems directly associated with it as well, but more technical than anyone is going to want to read about here). Again, this is not to say that he couldn't play the trumpet. But it is to say that he was not a particularly good trumpet player, especially as we are comparing him to other professional players - he was a fantastic musician, but these are not the same things. There is only so far one can develop as a player of an instrument if one's basic fundamentals are that flawed, no matter how good a musician one is in other respects. Though many musicians don't like them, perhaps an athletic analogy is appropriate here. There is only so far a baseball pitcher can go if his basic throwing motions are flawed. Perhaps an even better comparison might be to swimming - the better your technique with each stroke, the better you will swim. Anyone can learn to swim, and pretty much anyone can be taught to make a sound on a brass instrument - you could teach a monkey to make a loud noise on a brass instrument. But you couldn't teach him to play soft with great control...hope all this makes some sense.
