John Coppola

Proving that this surname has life in the entertainment business outside the movie godfather's dynasty, trumpeter John Coppola's accomplishments include securing an important niche as one of progressive jazz bandleader Stan Kenton's best brassmen. To measure up to those standards required diligence, discipline and a lip with the strength of a warrior queen, abilities that eventually inspired one of the world's master instrument craftsmen to design the Marcinkiewicz "Coppola Model" trumpet. The John Coppola whom this horn was made for started working professionally at the age of 13. At 21, he was blowing jazz with the Charlie Barnet band, with Kenton a year later. Throughout the '50s Coppola was well known and busy on the San Francisco jazz scene. Midway through that decade he began an extended relationship with Woody Herman's big band.

The trumpeter packed his cases for many performing and recording engagements that inevitably came about as a result of the Herman group's superb reputation in the '60s; Coppola's chops and feel for mainstream jazz was surely part of the lure as well. His resume lists well-known names, an interconnected series of relationships of vital importance to a broad swath of pop and vocal music: Frank Sinatra, Nelson Riddle, Henry Mancini, Gerald Wilson and so forth. Coppola chose a basic triumvirate of jazz messiahs as his major trumpet influences when polled by critic Leonard Feather: Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis. It seems to be the swing revival that has kept Coppola busiest since the '90s. He performs regularly in the San Francisco area with the John Coppola-Lisa Pollard Ensemble. His wife Frances Lynne Coppola was a swing singer, performing in USO clubs during the second World War as well as with musicians such as Gene Krupa in later years. ~ Eugene Chadbourne