Roy Roman
Roy Roman is a screech trumpet player who has performed with Lionel Hampton, the Benny Goodman Orchestra, Lee Morgan, and Bob Hope. Roy began playing the trumpet at age 19. After an injury to one of his front teeth, he was introduced to Roy Stevens, the teacher of a radical method of embouchure development pioneered by William Costello. This method entailed going for the highest note possible at all times and uses very little pressure. Roy performed this exercise with both sets of teeth clamped firmly against his tongue. This, he claimed, was the way that great high-note trumpet players like Bud Brisbois, Maynard Ferguson and Bill Chase played (”Chase’s astounding endurance was a result of how he bit the living crap out of his tongue,” Roman says). Eventually, this resulted in a method entitled GodlyChops, which Roman teaches.
Though his method (and Roman himself) have often been knocked as unmusical, and students who have tried the method complain that they can no longer play with good intonation, sound, articulation and musical taste, these arguments are considered irrelevant by Roman because his goal with this method is to play “really stinkin’ high.”
He is no relation to the Roy Roman who hosts segments of the Canadian television show Sex, Toys & Chocolate in which he asks people on the streets and in the clubs of Miami sexual questions.
