When jazz aficionados debate the heir-apparent to the hard-bop trumpet throne once occupied by Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, and Lee Morgan, there is one name sure to come up: Jeremy Pelt.

Pelt is the real deal. Over the last decade he's paid his dues as a sideman while forging a solo career through seven critically acclaimed albums. With his superb new CD, "Men Of Honor," and an extensive tour to support it, Pelt stands ready to stake his claim in the jazz firmament.

He was born in California, where his father, Timothy Pelt, worked as an actor, playing character roles in films like "Claudine" and "Come Back, Charleston Blue." His father was killed in a car accident in 1977 when Pelt was less than a year old. His mother played music around the house, favoring female singers like Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington whose tone, inflection, and phrasing were comparable to that of the greatest jazz instrumentalists.

When Pelt first took up the trumpet, he played classical music. But the year he entered high school, 1991, Miles Davis died. When his teacher played "So What?", one of Davis' best-known songs, it didn't take long for Davis to become Pelt's trumpet hero. But his knowledge was expanding fast.

"At the time the obscure cats to me included Freddie Hubbard," says Pelt. "Then a friend of mine gave me a Freddie Hubbard disc. Friends of the family gave me a Lee Morgan disc."

Pelt is aware of the link between the bold styles of Davis, Morgan, and Hubbard and his own fiery technique, but he never set out to imitate anyone. "There comes a certain time where it just becomes part of your personality. Sometimes you feel like being gregarious and [there are] times you feel like not saying anything."

When a non-trumpet player picks up the instrument, it can seem impossible just to get a note out of it, let alone play with clarity or improvise. But for Pelt, the trumpet never was challenging.

"I believe in such a thing as a natural trumpet player," he says. "The process of playing the trumpet came naturally to me. I can't ever remember it being a struggle to get a sound out of the horn."

After high school Pelt moved across the country to attend Boston's famed Berklee College of Music. "Berklee was a meeting place for all the younger players, so I met a lot of people I still stay in contact with. That said, as soon as I graduated I got out of there. Boston was never the place to be living and playing the music and making the scene. First of all, the place closes down too early. You're already killing the scene. You can't be out there trying to hang and the place closes at 1:30" in the morning, he says.

So, at 21, Pelt moved to Manhattan ready to hit the clubs and prove himself. To pay the rent he got a day job, working at music store Sam Goody. At night he'd be out until 4 a.m., hanging out and playing at clubs like Cleopatra's Needle. "I feel like I was turning heads," he says, but it was far from easy.

"It's a romantic concept that you move to New York unknown and somebody just picks you up and says, ‘Hey, I'm going to put you here' and then you're on top of the world. That's hard to find these days. What you have to do is network before you get here. I put myself in touch with a couple of trumpet players that I knew and they always looked out for me. If there was somebody who needed a trumpet player for a gig they would refer me," he says.

Philip Harper hooked him up with the Mingus Big Band, James Zollar got him on tour with the Skatalites and Roy Hargrove's Big Band. Eddie Henderson got him his first record date as a sideman.

Now, with a young family, he tries not to hang out late too often.

When Pelt is improvising, he tries not to think about it too much. "Sometimes I'm in the zone and sometimes I think I'm in the zone. If I like my solo on the record there will always be some kind of quote from what I did on the record," he says.

When he plays standards, his approach is to learn the words and take them into consideration when expressing the melody. To do this, he listens to singers like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Arthur Prysock, and his favorite, Carmen McRae.

Although he has been praised for picking up the mantle of hard-bop greats, Pelt does not consider himself a traditionalist. "I don't mind electric music," he says. "I've got an electric band. I do hope that whoever's playing can really play and be adaptable. I always pride myself on being adaptable and digging as much music as I can."

Sure enough, his iPod is no iSnob. Pelt reads the play list: The Turtles, The Jackson 5, Jimi Hendrix, Earth Wind & Fire, Feist, Flora Purim, P-Funk, and some hip-hop, cutting a wide swath through decades and genres.

Pelt will be bringing the quintet that played on the "Men Of Honor" CD to Rochester. While he wrote four of the album's tracks, he also recorded tunes by each of his sidemen. That kind of generosity, not to mention band-wide compositional talent, is rare.

Pelt's quintet is made up entirely of black musicians, another rarity. If you go to a jazz festival these days most of the players, not to mention audience members, are white. Is Pelt making a statement about maintaining the legacy of music that emerged from the African-American experience?

"I pick the right person for the job. I don't go looking for black musicians, but at the same time there is a bit of significance because it is our tradition, and I love the fact that there's a presence there at festivals, when you see that on the stage."

Brass tacks

[ PROFILE ] BY RON NETSKY

Jeremy Pelt Quintet

Sunday, February 21

Radisson Riverside Hotel, 120 E Main St.

4 p.m. | $10-$25 | 733-7685, ExodusToJazz.com