“It has often been the good fortune of Jazz musicians – or the misfortune, depending upon which way you look at it – to flash like a comet into the musical sky with a startling distinct and original style. The advantage of this kind of arrival, obviously, is that it makes an immediate name for the artist, establishing for him enough prestige and firm identification to last him for years. The handicap, however, is less immediately evident; it tends to “type-cast” the musician and thus, in effect, circumscribes the area of his activities by providing the public with a preconceived notion of what to expect from him at all times.
This is the way it went with Maynard Ferguson. Only twenty years old when he hit the American Jazz scene in 1948 as a sideman with Boyd Raeburn and Jimmy Dorsey (he had previously led his own band in Canada), Ferguson enjoyed such immediate and tremendous impact through his records with Charlie Barnet and Stan Kenton during the following couple of years, that his fantastic technique and amazing ability to reach into the stratosphere register of the trumpet tended to obscure every other aspect of his work.
Fortunately, during the last year or two since he began recording for Emarcy, Maynard has been better able to express his musical aims and reveal himself not merely as a flashy showman but as a fine all-around musician with sound, solid ideas of the kind of band he should have around him.”
Unascribed liner notes to the Emarcy LP Around the Horn with Maynard Ferguson [1956]