"In much the same way that we remember where we were and what we were doing when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Ponomarev recalls the exact moment he first heard modern jazz. "I had been playing gigs at music college and dance bands," he remembers. "I was 18, and a friend invited me over to his place to hear something he had taped off the radio. When I got there, he said nothing, just pushed the button and out came 'The Blues Walk' by Clifford Brown [from his 1955 quintet with Max Roach]. God Almighty! I was swept off my feet. That was exactly the music I was searching for. I literally couldn't live without the music."
From that moment on, Ponomarev dedicated his life to hard bop. Finding LPs was "virtually impossible" in Russia under the Brezhnev regime, but the trumpeter did manage to buy a few on the black market. Study in Brown and Dinah [Washington] Jams each cost him a month's salary. And after hearing the Art Blakey Quintet's A Night at Birdland, a 1954 live date featuring Brown, he set his sights on becoming, one way or another, a Jazz Messenger. Employing what psychologists now call "positive visualization," Ponomarev transcribed "tons and tons" of trumpet solos by Brown and later Messengers Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard. "To achieve something," he explains, "you have to know exactly what it is and have a clear image of it. I loved Blakey's music so much, and had practiced it so long, that I had a clear image of myself playing with Blakey. [In Russia], in my mind, I was already part of the band."
A few months after escaping Russia and landing in Manhattan, Ponomarev found himself standing next to his hero Blakey at a Messengers gig at the Five Spot. He was prepared. He knew what he would say to his prospective employer, he knew all the music. He had everything down pat--or so he thought. "When I was introduced to him, I said, 'I'm from Russia, I play trumpet.' And he said, 'So, where's your trumpet?'" The next night, having grasped Jazz Lesson No. 1 and overcome his embarrassment, he brought his horn, sat in with the band, earned a hug from Blakey and laid the groundwork for his eventual membership in the Messengers family."----From Hot House Profile
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