Licks and lessons from Detroit

Soulful Detroit trumpeter Dwight Adams can teach MSU Jazz Studies students a lot of things when he comes to town for a week-long residency and a concert Friday night, but self-promotion is not one of them. 

Adams is more interested in honesty than hype. 

Friday, he played a gig with Stevie Wonder but gave it a mixed review.  

“It was a corporate gig at some ranch in the middle of the desert in California,” he said. “It could have been much better, but the fans don’t know that.” 

Adams has played with Wonder for nearly 30 years, although they hadn’t played together since 2019. 

“He was in good form,” Adams said. “He’s had some health problems, but he seems to have recovered quite well.” 

Adams teaches jazz at Wayne State University, but he’s no lecturer. You have to catch lessons from him as they swim by in the river of his memory.  

“I’ve made my share of mistakes, and so has he,” Adams said of Wonder. “But he’s like a jazz musician at heart. He knows how to make lemonade out of lemons — recover if you will. ‘It’s not what I wanted to play, but I kind of dig it. Let’s see where it goes.’” 

When Adams said the gig could have been better, he was really beating up on himself. Although he has been a stalwart on the scene for decades, playing gigs with every great Detroit musician and more than holding his own, he has yet to release a recording under his own name, and promotional videos on social media are nonexistent. 

“I’m definitely my worst critic,” he said. “It’s taken me a while to accept who I am on my instrument, to be secure in myself.” 

Not long ago, a friend told Adams that one of his trumpet solos went viral. 

He mimicked his friend’s excitement. “Man, people are transcribing your solo and recording themselves on YouTube doing it. It’s awesome.’” 

But Adams was horrified. 

“No, it is not awesome,” he said. “It is terrible! There are people better suited for that. It’s OK, I’m flattered, but you need to transcribe the guy I would transcribe. You should transcribe Clifford Brown. Then transcribe the guy Clifford Brown transcribed!” 

As a young man, Adams lived with his grandmother and his uncle Rodney, who was only six years older and “more of an older brother.” 

Uncle Rodney was a musician and constantly played R&B, rock and roll and fusion records at home. It took years for Adams to work his way back from the fusion era and learn that fusion pioneers like Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock played straight-ahead jazz before they plugged in. 

Adams got his first taste of playing “real jazz” in a summer workshop led by seminal Detroit musician-educators Teddy Harris and Donald Walden. Harris liked what he heard and recruited Adams to a smaller group, New Breed Bebop Society. 

“It was school for me,” Adams said. The group did a two-year stint at the old Dummy George’s jazz club at Seven Mile and Wyoming in Detroit, backing a series of jazz headliners like Red Prysock. 

After studying classical trumpet at the University of Kentucky for a year, he put the trumpet down for about five years. 

“I got kind of disenchanted,” he said. “It’s hard to make a living, and it’s even harder now unless somebody takes you by the hand and shows you the opportunities that are out there.” 

But he still loved the music and went to the clubs, where Detroit jazz icons like trumpeter Marcus Belgrave and saxophonist James Carter badgered him to pick up the horn. 

“Marcus would tell me to practice and start getting some of these gigs,” Adams said. “You might not get rich, but you can make it. You’ve got to go for it, have faith.” Another lesson just swam by. 

In 1998, Adams was playing gigs with legendary Detroit saxophonist Ernie Rodgers, band director at Northwestern High School. Rodgers, a first-call musician, played with everyone from Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie to Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin. 

“He knew everybody in the business,” Adams said. 

One day, Rodgers got a call from Stevie Wonder’s bassist, Nathan Watts, a native Detroiter. Wonder’s trumpet player was spending too much time hustling real estate, and he wanted someone more focused on music. 

“I’ve got just the guy for you,” Rodgers told him. 

It so happens that when Adams was a teenager, his Uncle Rodney played Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life” about 1,000 times every morning before going to school. 

“Learn it? I had no choice but to learn it, repetitively, day in and day out,” Adams said.  

He knew every note on the album and aced the audition with Wonder. 

After a few minutes with Adams, you get a fisherman’s feel for when the next lesson is about to swim by. 

“It’s all about being in the right place at the right time,” he said. “And being somewhat prepared when that opportunity comes.”