While listening to cornetist Nat Adderley light it up during a recent listening session, I thought “Why does he play this aggressive style on cornet and not on the trumpet?” I was thinking of the cliched perception of the cornet, as personified by cornet greats King Oliver, Bix, Bobby Hackett, et al. But think Adderley, Thad Jones, Warren Vaché, Olu Dara, Taylor Ho Bynum, Butch Morris, and Graham Haynes. To some degree, these guys have all broken the bounds of how the cornet is played.
The cornet sound is theoretically mellower and rounder than the trumpet. The horns have the same length of tubing, but the cornet is squashed together a little more and most important, has more conical tubing than a trumpet, which has a cylindrical bore until it flares approaching the bell. The cornet mouthpiece emphasizes this difference. No scientist I, but I assume the acoustic difference may be that the wave form is less sawtooth and more sine.
When the “new wave” of cornet players cited above blow long notes, you can hear the difference between the two horns (especially with the kind of vibrato that Vaché has), but essentially, these guys play the cornet like it was a trumpet, with brilliance, fire, and a lot of upper register—I assume their mouthpiece choice helps accomplish t
