Theodore Lee Croker is an American trumpeter from Leesburg, Florida. Croker is famous for employing elements of jazz, funk, and hip-hop into his sound, as well as his acute expertise of the trumpet. Theo Croker has frequently collaborated with other artists in the contemporary jazz and hip-hop fields such as J. Cole, Ari Lennox, and Common. Croker is considered by many as one of the cutting-edge talents in contemporary jazz right now.

What was your experience like working with J. Cole?
  
You know, it’s like working with any rapper, it’s different than working with a musician. You have to interpret it as a musician, you have to interpret what these artists are looking for because you don’t share a common vocabulary or knowledge base, it’s different. I mean, you know it can be fun and it can also be just like working with any rapper in a position like that, or it could just be easy.
 
 
The cool thing about J. Cole is - and we established this from the beginning before we recorded anything - I was like, if you need a horn player, I could recommend some people for you.  That’s just not my shit, you know, if you want me to do what it is I do, I’m down. And that’s what he wanted, and he was true to that. Everything I played on that record, I conceptualized; it’s what I heard, it’s what I felt would fit. Then they narrowed it down to what they liked so I was just able to be myself, and that’s really the only type of creative situation I want to be in. I don’t want to ever be in a situation where I’m playing something someone else came up with. It's important for me to maintain my voice and sound and not diminish myself to fit somebody else’s creation.
 
 
That being said, I also learned a lot about ways to make a record from a non-musician standpoint. The way they would just have so many people coming in and out all the time, and the way they would just be open, you know? In the past, going into making a record we would know what we want as musicians and artists and be like, okay we got three days to get down all of this stuff. And I think since that experience I’ve just been able to go into studios and just think in the studio, and just create in the studio, and it’s a more organic process. So I saw rappers doing that and I was like, I could incorporate that. I’ve been merging the way I make records now, with both some planning but also some just having no idea what’s gonna happen or how it's gonna happen, and that led me to do some pretty cool things creatively.

 
“4 Your Eyez Only” by J. Cole surpassed over 100,000,000 streams on Spotify alone. How did you get involved?  Did you know it was going to be as big as it was?
  
I mean I assumed it was gonna be big with all the money I saw getting spent. But no, unfortunately in those situations when you’re somebody being brought in, a lotta times you don’t know shit. I didn’t even know the album was coming out, I didn’t know the names of which songs I was working on, I didn’t know any of that stuff. I didn’t even know the album was coming out till the day it came out. But that’s not always necessarily important to some of those big labels & organizations in those genres. I haven’t been involved in anything since so it was really just a moment of learning creatively. I took it for what it was at that moment and continued on with my life. 

 
 
Was there anything you remember growing up that led you towards working in music? Did you always know you wanted to pursue music? 
 
Yeah, my grandfather was a Black American Music legend: he won a Grammy in the 90’s, he subbed for Louis Armstrong in the ’20s, he’s on Billie Holiday’s most famous recording, “Fine And Mellow”, he was a lead player in the Cab Calloway’s band at the Cotton Club for 10 years, he was in Benny Goodman’s sextet when they went on tour for 6 months to London, Tokyo, France, etc., a ton of crazy places, then he went on and was Mr. Trumpet Man on Ricardo “Richie” Ray’s song, “Mr. Trumpet Man”. Then in his 70s, he became a bandleader and a soloist. So I mean that’s the legacy I come out of blood-wise and family-wise. It was a huge inspiration and one of my earliest memories. It felt practical and normal to want to play music, it didn’t seem like this unobtainable thing to me and my family never made me feel like I can’t do that or you should study something else. They wanted me to be well-rounded so they were like, if this is what you love and want to do, put your whole heart into it. I was very fortunate to have had that because I got a lot of friends and family who were talented musicians that I came up with whose families simply, you know, just wanted them to go be a doctor and waste all their talent. Not waste all their talent, but you know …just not use it. They think people can’t make money playing music, like I make plenty of money playing music, I have since I was a teenager; making money in music has nothing to do with music. The only way to fail is to give up.
 
 
Now what my grandfather's legacy means to me is a little bit different. Now it empowers me to do my own thing. It empowers me to break what they have considered being traditions. Most traditions in this industry have been implemented to help people be involved in it or to help different communities stay relevant in a way. My grandfather was royalty in what they call Jazz, so it really puts me in a position where I don’t care about what other people think about what I’m doing. I don’t follow what they say I should do, or how they say I should sound, or what they think I need to know, or how many songs you gotta know and play. I just don’t believe that shit anymore. I think the more I find power in that, the more my career grows.
 
 

Do you have a routine that you usually stick to? For jazz musicians I understand there is an intense amount of practice that goes into playing. At your expertise, do you still practice?
 
I mean I don’t consider myself a jazz musician, honestly, I can’t fucking stand the word. For years I just couldn’t stand it; like it doesn’t offend me but it also doesn’t define me. It’s a half-ass word implemented by people who didn’t even play the music. It’s a jive term, it was incorporated, you know it’s a racist term. It’s negative in every connotation in what it came from. The musicians that are playing what they are calling jazz never called it that. From Miles Davis to Gary Bartz, Duke Ellington, like to them it was just music. So I don’t practice much anymore, I just play to play. 
 

 
So from your perspective, what do you prefer Jazz to be named? 
 
It doesn’t have to have a name, it's just Black music. It’s the music and the tradition of what Black Americans have done since they came to America with their entire diaspora of music; which is older than the European civilization, period. You could call it “B.A.M.” or whatever, I don’t think it's important to call it something. If Drake drops an album tomorrow that has a bunch of “jazz musicians” on it, he’ll be a “jazz” musician. It would be some new thing, so it’d be at a  forefront. All the popular music that has come out of America, every time there’s been a “new genre”, or “new thing”, or “new sound”…it's been the same musicians coming out of the same diaspora of Black music. To me, it’s [jazz] just a stupid word. And people are gonna get offended and get butt hurt over it. They may wanna defend it, guard it, keep it alive, and they don’t even fucking know why. They don’t even know why they wanna keep calling this shit “jazz”. Because it makes you feel good or something? I don’t know. My thoughts on talking about this are not even fully, fully, fully, fully, ready to be out here like.. this is stupid, and here’s why: It just feels likes it is so demeaning and it's only a portion of what it is we do! But I’m not here to spark, or stoke, any type of revolution, or force people to call it what they don’t want. The majority of my work is in a “Jazz Club” or a “Jazz Festival”, but the problem that I find is I’m only called a jazz musician because I play the trumpet…that’s it. If I was singing they would come up with a new name for it. Put it in a different category, but instead, I feel like the genre “jazz” market and music business situation is a way to marginalize some of the super creative musicians that are out there; if you understand harmony and rhythm of all types, especially of the Black diaspora, and you can improvise something that existed all over Africa and the rest of the world before “Jazz”. You play an instrument, and then they call you a Jazz musician - it doesn’t make any sense to me. Jazz is considered a Black thing, but then we’re gonna make Benny Goodman the king of it, and we’ll let Duke Ellington be the duke. Like bro come on, it’s obviously marginalized, and sometimes it’s just the way I see music written about. I’ll see a legend like Eddie Henderson or Herbie Hancock in a “jazz” magazine, and they’ll give ‘em only 2 - 3 stars or some wack shit like that. And then right next to it they’ll give some young up-and-coming “jazz” white musician, you know who is literally just regurgitating the culture, and they’ll put em on the same page and give him five stars. Because he’s buying into the whole “genre” the way “they” want. And like wow, that’s a way to put him on - playing the game. To force it into that kinda category, it holds back the creatives and it keeps them stuck in that $100-a-gig mentality. That’s why I don’t consider myself a “jazz” musician. Because you know, I’m not into playing a lot of standards. There are some that are beautiful and a lot that I like, but standards are just old pop songs. So how did old pop songs become you know “jazz” or whatever. They don’t know, it’s so stupid to me. I just want my music to be listened to and received as music, right up there with The Weeknd. [The Weeknd previously spoke out against the Grammys and also the word “urban” arguing that he makes pop music and not urban music. Since then, the Grammys have made reforms, and labels such as Republic Records have removed the word “urban” from their job titles and departments.] And it just keeps people away from the music when it has a dumbass name. At the end of the day, I’m really just a fan of how creative people are. When I hear things that are super creative by artists, I love it you know. Like Solange, I think she’s super creative. I don’t know how good of a musician she is, I don’t really even care how good of a musician she is or what she knows about music, I care that she’s creative. And that’s really the whole point of art and music, to be creative, to me at least. And also I didn’t pioneer this conceptualization, Miles Davis didn’t call it “jazz”, Duke Ellington didn’t call it “jazz”, Gary Bartz didn’t call it “jazz”, it's just silly. Like it's funny that the originators of jazz have no say and it that has been spread out and categorized into sections. Just like the Black community, and jazz was named and grouped by people who didn’t start the genre and who have no involvement or connection to the genre. Like what really resonates with me is that it’s all one thing. If you removed the trumpet from all my music you wouldn’t call it jazz anymore. That’s just a box they created and I won’t put myself in a box. So that’s why when they're like oh just call it jazz, I’m like nah fuck you! 

You have traveled and performed all over the world. Of all your shows and performances, which were the most memorable?
 
That’s always a hard question to answer, I guess some of my favorite places to perform would have to be some of my favorite places to go to. Like Greece was amazing, but really anywhere where the people are engaged is my favorite place to perform and the vibrations people put out; sadly that’s not always the case here in America. In America, there are a lot of people on their phones at shows. To me, I’d rather perform somewhere random where the people are engaged with me. Working in China was also a really unique experience. In China anything Black is jazz, doesn’t matter if you’re rapping or singing, Detroit house, it didn’t matter. To them, if it came out of the legacy of Black people, it was jazz, which I thought was so cool. Pretty deep. So a jazz club in China wasn’t the same as here, people just went there to see Black music. it was a party, and I still haven’t really found that here in the states yet. It really was a party because you were playing for people that had no preconceptions and who have never heard anything like this before, so there were no categories it was just Black music. Like they weren’t ignorant, they were just hearing it and receiving it as music.
 
 
 
Who have you not worked with that you would love to?
 
There are so many people, it’s hard, let me think about it. I’m a very moody person some days I don’t know. I would love to work with Jill Scott, we would vibe. I would love to work with Solange, I think that setting would be an incredible opportunity for my creativity. I want to be in situations where I can contribute creatively, because for me, creativity is why I do this. It’s not to play well, it's to be creative. So like right off the bat those are two people where everything they do is creative. I’d also love to work with artists like Kelsey Lu or Wyclef Jean. I’d love to work with people like that, really just anyone who is open to being creative, and not worried as much as how are we gonna sell what it is that we made. Or how is what we made gonna fit what’s hot right now. To me, I’m not in it for that. It’s a legacy thing, you know like we here to build. I want to work with people who are in it for fun and not for the work, and who are not afraid to go against capitalism. But yeah, I think my whole thing is when working with people - and J. Cole helped me to understand this about myself years later after the fact - when I work with people, I really wanna bring something out of them that they don’t do themselves. Like if I get in the stu with Goldlink, we could make a beat and do the rap thing or we could create something else that’s different …that nobody will like. Because then people have to market it and sell it, and they have no idea what to do with it. That’s when you know you got a hit! When it doesn’t sound like something you’ve heard before or a culmination of things, as I also believe there is nothing new under the sun. I wouldn’t say believe, I’d say understands that. The past is the present, and the future only exists in the present. There’s no new school, there’s no old school, it’s just all of us living under the same sun using the same energy, the same vibrations. What’s been here has always been here, and will continue to be here beyond any of us. It’s just about what we do with it right now to serve ourselves as people creatively. So all the artists I named are creatives in that way, I know that, I feel it when I put on their music.

Click here for Spotify and here for Tidal, to listen to the playlist curated of songs highlighting Theo Croker’s best works and biggest inspirations.