I want to say this was fall of 1982. I had booked Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition to play at SUNY-Binghamton. The day of the show arrives and the first musician to show up (two hours before soundcheck) is Howard Johnson. We hadn’t even been expecting him. The group was supposed to be DeJohnette with John Purcell, Chico Freeman and Rufus Reid, all of whom showed up later. So we welcome Howard in. He’s relaxed, setting up his instruments, taking his time. He pulls out this small brass instrument that I had never seen before, starts oiling the valves. I had to ask him what it was: “Oh, that’s a four-valve, rotary-valve trumpet.” He plays a few notes, looks at it. “Miles picked that up one time…” He looks at me: “He couldn’t get a sound out of it.” Howard goes back to work.
Photo credit: Manfred Werner (Tsui), CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons