Lew Soloff's Breathing Exercises

Lew Soloff is among the best lead trumpet players of all times. Within a career spanning over more than five decades, he will always be remembered for his work in Blood, Sweat & Tears with his iconic Spinning Wheels trumpet solo. When I studied at Rimon School of Music twenty something years ago (yes, it has been that long since...), Soloff was invited to perform and give a workshop at our school. During that workshop, he said something he said something that kept bugging every now and then, throughout the years. He told us that as you age your lung capacity naturally declines, and for wind players this causes a noticeable decline in their playing ability. This, however can be avoided, so he told us, by performing certain breathing exercises that increase your air capacity until they form a habit. Soloff claimed that by practicing these exercises on a regular basis when he was younger, he felt no decline at a later age. Soloff was around 60 at that time, and I can attest first-hand that his playing then was indeed phenomenal.

Being in my twenties then, problems of this sort seemed to belong to the distant future. But as years went by, I began to ask myself whether I should take Soloff's advice more seriously. I didn't remember exactly what these exercises were and how he learned them, but a short online search led me to the following video where he describes them in detail:

Watching this video reveals that who taught these breathing exercises to Soloff was no other than Arnold Jacobs, the legendary tuba player of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and one of the greatest wind instruments pedagogues. In this video, Soloff says that whereas Jacobs instructed him to execute these exercises everyday for a period of six months, he decided to do them three times a day for a while year, and that he still does them occasionally. Soloff was at the age of 70 when this video was taken, and in the few sounds he makes on it he still sounds fantastic. About six months later, Soloff passed away suddenly by a heart attack. This interview with him is fill with insights about music in general, and wind instruments in particular. I highly recommended watching it.

For some reason, I remembered Soloff telling us that the age of 60 is about the time when one's air capacity begins to naturally decline. However, in this interview he explicitly mentions that this phenomenon begins around 50. I have no idea if this is true, but in the meantime I also got to "around 50". So maybe these is the time to give these exercises a shot, after all these years. Will I be able to commit to them, and if so, what would be the results? I hope I'll have interesting things to tell you about this in the future.