Jazz Trumpet Players: 15 Greats from Louis Armstrong to Ambrose Akinmusire

These are 15 jazz trumpet players who changed how the instrument is played, from Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five records of the 1920s to Ambrose Akinmusire, who won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 2007. Armstrong comes first because he moved jazz from collective improvisation to the featured solo, and nearly every trumpeter after him built on that. The list runs in chronological order rather than as a ranking, and each entry gives the reason the player matters and a record to start with.

From New Orleans to Bebop

1. Louis Armstrong (1901-1971)

Armstrong followed his mentor King Oliver from New Orleans to Chicago in 1922 to play second cornet in Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, and switched to trumpet in Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra in 1924. His Hot Five and Hot Seven records for Okeh (1925 to 1928) made the improvised solo the center of jazz, and his trumpet introduction to “West End Blues” (1928) is counted among the most influential improvisations in the music. He also helped popularize scat singing with “Heebie Jeebies” (1926), and his 1964 No. 1 hit “Hello, Dolly!” won him the Grammy for Best Male Vocal Performance. See also our ranking of Armstrong's best recordings.

Start with: the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings (Okeh, 1925-1928), available in several complete reissues.

2. Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993)

Gillespie built on Roy Eldridge’s speed and high register and, with Charlie Parker, worked out the fast tempos and altered chords of bebop in the 1940s. He wrote “A Night in Tunisia” in 1942, and after the Cuban conga player Chano Pozo joined his big band in 1947, the two co-wrote “Manteca”, his best-known Afro-Cuban piece. His upturned bell dates from 1953, when his trumpet was bent by accident at a party and he liked the sound. Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, Jon Faddis and Arturo Sandoval all learned from him, and he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989.

Start with: Jazz at Massey Hall (Debut, 1953), the only recording of Gillespie, Parker, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach as a group.

Cool Jazz and Hard Bop

3. Miles Davis (1926-1991)

Davis left the Juilliard School to play in Charlie Parker’s quintet (1944 to 1948) and then kept changing direction. His nonet sessions for Capitol in 1949 and 1950, later collected as Birth of the Cool, helped launch cool jazz. The title track of Milestones (1958) and all of Kind of Blue (1959) were built on scales instead of fast-moving chord changes, and Bitches Brew (1970) pushed jazz toward rock and funk. Kind of Blue was certified 5x Platinum in 2019 and was the highest-certified jazz album in the US until A Charlie Brown Christmas reached 6x Platinum in August 2026. Davis won eight Grammy Awards, and 2026 marks his centenary. Read our full Miles Davis biography and our pick of the ten best Miles Davis albums.

Start with: Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959).

4. Chet Baker (1929-1988)

Baker, born in Yale, Oklahoma, came to attention in 1952 in the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, where his solo on “My Funny Valentine” became a hit. His soft, lyrical sound became the trumpet voice of West Coast cool jazz, and in the 1950s he beat both Miles Davis and Clifford Brown in the DownBeat and Metronome readers’ polls. Chet Baker Sings raised his profile and divided critics, and it received a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 2001. Bruce Weber’s documentary Let’s Get Lost came out in 1988, four months after Baker’s death.

Start with: Chet Baker Sings (Pacific Jazz, 1954).

5. Clifford Brown (1930-1956)

Brown recorded for only about four years. He won DownBeat’s Critics’ Poll as New Star of the Year in 1954, co-led the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet, a leading early hard bop group, and wrote “Sandu”, “Joy Spring” and “Daahoud”, all now jazz standards. His warm tone and clean articulation at fast tempos became a model: Lee Morgan took lessons from him, and Freddie Hubbard started out under his influence. He died in a car crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in June 1956, aged 25, and Benny Golson wrote “I Remember Clifford” in his memory.

Start with: Study in Brown (EmArcy, 1955), whose “Cherokee” solo is one of the most admired in jazz.

6. Kenny Dorham (1924-1972)

Dorham joined Charlie Parker’s band in 1948, was a charter member of the original Jazz Messengers and replaced Clifford Brown in Max Roach’s quintet after Brown’s death. He wrote “Blue Bossa”, first recorded on Joe Henderson’s Page One (1963). His tone was pure and clear, especially on ballads, and Afro-Cuban (Blue Note, 1955), with conga player Carlos “Patato” Valdés, brought Latin percussion into a hard bop session. Critics, Gary Giddins among them, have long held him up as the model of an underrated player.

Start with: ‘Round About Midnight at the Cafe Bohemia (Blue Note, 1956), recorded live.

The 1960s and 1970s: Blue Note and Beyond

7. Lee Morgan (1938-1972)

Morgan, from Philadelphia, joined Dizzy Gillespie’s big band at 18, played on John Coltrane’s Blue Train (1958) and was in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for Moanin’. His bright, biting sound grew out of Clifford Brown’s. The Sidewinder, recorded in 1963, reached No. 25 on the Billboard album chart and became Blue Note’s best-selling record, pulling the label back from near bankruptcy. Morgan made 25 albums as a leader for Blue Note before his common-law wife, Helen Moore, shot him at Slugs’ Saloon in New York on February 19, 1972, a story told in Kasper Collin’s 2016 documentary I Called Him Morgan.

Start with: The Sidewinder (Blue Note, 1964).

8. Freddie Hubbard (1938-2008)

Hubbard moved from Indianapolis to New York in 1958 and within a few years was on several of the decade’s most important records: Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth, Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch! and Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage. He replaced Lee Morgan in the Jazz Messengers in 1961 and stayed until 1966. At Creed Taylor’s CTI label, Red Clay (1970) moved him toward soul-jazz grooves, and First Light (1971) won the 1972 Grammy for Best Jazz Performance by a Group.

Start with: Red Clay (CTI, 1970).

9. Woody Shaw (1944-1989)

Shaw made his recording debut with Eric Dolphy, played in Horace Silver’s quintet in 1965 and 1966, and wrote “Moontrane” at 18. What set him apart was harmony: he built lines from wide intervals such as fourths and fifths, which do not lie naturally on the trumpet, and from pentatonic patterns that moved through several keys. Columbia signed him in 1977 after an endorsement from Miles Davis, and Rosewood earned two Grammy nominations and topped DownBeat’s 1978 readers’ poll for jazz album of the year. Wynton Marsalis was among those who studied with him. Shaw died in May 1989, months after being struck by a subway train in Brooklyn.

Start with: Rosewood (Columbia, 1978).

The Acoustic Revival of the 1980s and 1990s

10. Wynton Marsalis (born 1961)

The New Orleans-born son of pianist Ellis Marsalis joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1980 and signed with Columbia soon after. He is the only musician to win Grammys in jazz and classical categories in the same year, which he did in 1983 and again the next year, and he has nine Grammys in total. In 1987 he co-founded the jazz program at Lincoln Center that grew into Jazz at Lincoln Center, where he is artistic director. His oratorio Blood on the Fields was the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music (1997). In January 2026 he announced that he will step down as artistic director in July 2027.

Start with: Black Codes (From the Underground) (Columbia, 1985), which won two Grammys.

11. Tom Harrell (born 1946)

Harrell graduated from Stanford in 1969, toured with Stan Kenton and Woody Herman, and then spent long stretches in Horace Silver’s quintet (1973 to 1977) and Phil Woods’s quintet (1983 to 1989). In the early 1970s he also played on Vince Guaraldi’s music for several Peanuts television specials. Since 1989 he has led his own groups, built around his compositions, and his trumpet and flugelhorn playing has earned him several DownBeat trumpeter of the year awards. He is still recording: Alternate Summer came out on HighNote in 2024.

Start with: Form (Contemporary, 1990).

12. Roy Hargrove (1969-2018)

Wynton Marsalis heard Hargrove on a visit to his Dallas arts high school, and by the early 1990s Hargrove was one of the most in-demand of the “Young Lions” reviving hard bop. He won a Grammy in 1998 for Habana with his Cuban-American band Crisol, and a second for Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall (2002) with Herbie Hancock and Michael Brecker. He played on D’Angelo’s Voodoo and on records by Erykah Badu and Common, and led the RH Factor, which mixed jazz with soul, funk and hip-hop. He died in November 2018, aged 49.

Start with: Habana (Verve, 1997).

21st-Century Voices

13. Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (born 1983)

Many listeners know him as Christian Scott: he performed as Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah from 2012 and legally changed his name to Xian aTunde Adjuah in 2023. The New Orleans native, a nephew of saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr., calls his approach “stretch music”: jazz stretched to take in hip-hop, trap and West African percussion without discarding its conventions. He designs his own instruments, made by Adams, among them a trumpet with a bell tilted up 22 degrees, and on Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning (2023) he played his own inventions instead of trumpet. He has six Grammy nominations and two Edison Awards.

Start with: Stretch Music (Ropeadope, 2015).

14. Ambrose Akinmusire (born 1982)

Akinmusire grew up in Oakland, where saxophonist Steve Coleman heard him in the Berkeley High School Jazz Ensemble and hired him for a European tour. He won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 2007. He plays on the last track of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) and won the trumpet category of the DownBeat Critics Poll every year from 2013 to 2020. On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment (Blue Note, 2020) and Honey from a Winter Stone both drew Grammy nominations, the second at the 2026 awards, and in August 2026 he played the BBC Proms concert for the Miles Davis centenary.

Start with: his Blue Note debut When the Heart Emerges Glistening (2011), produced by Jason Moran.

15. Ibrahim Maalouf (born 1980)

Born in Beirut and raised in Paris, Maalouf learned the trumpet from his father, Nassim Maalouf, a former student of Maurice André who invented a quarter-tone trumpet that can play Arabic maqam. Ibrahim built his music on that horn, setting Arabic melody against jazz, rock and electronic textures. He has recorded with Sting, won the 2017 César for best original score, and became the first Lebanese instrumentalist nominated for a Grammy, for Queen of Sheba with Angélique Kidjo (2022), followed by a second nomination in 2023.

Start with: Illusions (2013), which won France’s Victoire de la Musique for world music album.

Six More Trumpeters Worth Hearing

• Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931): a cornetist whose lyrical solos on “Singin’ the Blues” and “I’m Coming, Virginia” (both 1927) pointed toward the jazz ballad.
• Roy Eldridge (1911-1989): the swing-era bridge to bebop, whose speed and upper-register playing shaped the young Gillespie.
• Fats Navarro (1923-1950): a bebop pioneer who died of tuberculosis at 26 but influenced Miles Davis, Clifford Brown and Lee Morgan.
• Clark Terry (1920-2015): played with Count Basie and Duke Ellington, helped popularize the flugelhorn in jazz and mentored Quincy Jones and Miles Davis.
• Don Cherry (1936-1995): Ornette Coleman’s partner on The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959), later a pioneer of world fusion.
• Lester Bowie (1941-1999): co-founder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago in 1968 and leader of the brass nonet Brass Fantasy.

Jazz Trumpet Players Today

Besides Marsalis, Harrell, Adjuah, Akinmusire and Maalouf, these five are worth following:

• Terence Blanchard (born 1962): a Jazz Messengers alumnus, twice Oscar-nominated for Spike Lee scores, whose Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2021) was the first opera by an African American composer staged by the Metropolitan Opera.
• Nicholas Payton (born 1973): a New Orleans trumpeter and multi-instrumentalist, Grammy winner in 1997, named chair of Berklee’s brass department in 2024.
• Arturo Sandoval (born 1949): Dizzy Gillespie’s Cuban-born protégé, a four-time Grammy winner and 2024 Kennedy Center Honoree.
• Theo Croker (born 1985): a grandson of Doc Cheatham, mentored by Donald Byrd, heard on albums by J. Cole and Common.
• Marquis Hill (born 1987): a Chicago trumpeter who won the 2014 Thelonious Monk trumpet competition and mixes jazz with hip-hop and house.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the greatest jazz trumpet player of all time?

Our answer is Louis Armstrong, because his Hot Five and Hot Seven records of 1925 to 1928 made the improvised solo the center of jazz. Miles Davis is the strongest alternative: over nearly five decades he was at the front of bebop, cool jazz, modal jazz and fusion.

Who are the best jazz trumpet players today?

Among living players, the established names are Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Tom Harrell, Arturo Sandoval and Nicholas Payton. Among younger players, start with Ambrose Akinmusire, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott), Ibrahim Maalouf, Theo Croker and Marquis Hill.

Who are the most famous Black jazz trumpet players?

Most of the players who shaped jazz trumpet were Black Americans, from King Oliver and Louis Armstrong to Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw and Roy Hargrove. Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire are among the best known working today.

Which jazz trumpet album should a beginner start with?

Start with Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959). Then try Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder (Blue Note, 1964) for a hard bop groove, Chet Baker Sings (Pacific Jazz, 1954) for ballads, and Clifford Brown’s Study in Brown (EmArcy, 1955) to hear how fast and clean bebop trumpet can be.