by Philip Myers
I had the opportunity to study with Mr. Bloom at the Blossom Music School during the summer sessions of 1970 & 1971. It changed my life. Up until that time I was consumed with the difficulties I was having on the horn. He helped me learn to think and listen to music without filtering it through the technical issues of the horn. This I had never done.
If I could attribute the main thought I got from him, it was the inexorable march forward of a phrase. This idea that most of the time music is moving forward, not falling away, has so many ramifications that present themselves to the curious that I have spent the last fifty years trying to realize them.
At the time I studied with him he had an absolutely unique teaching style. In my mind it could be described as “defender of music and the phrase”. When I played for him I felt like he was literally protecting the purity of his ideas from what I was doing. And he should have been as I had no idea what I was doing.
Not to be sacrilegious, but to me “he spoke as one having authority”. I had no doubt from the moment he began to teach me that he knew something connected to a greater knowledge that I wanted desperately to know - and he did share it.
He knew precisely what he liked and what he did not, but I always felt he was a very realistic and humble man, and with me as a student, very open. I heard him play about 40 live concerts and have every recording of his that I can find. To this day, if I think about a piece that he recorded or that I heard him play live, in my head I hear him playing it, his idea, not my own.
