When he’s not on the road, smooth jazz trumpeter Rick Braun grabs any opportunity he can to tackle the garden behind his family’s Woodland Hills home.
Sweat, blood and backbreaking labor have all gone into attaining the luxurious Mediterranean-inspired terraced slope — a look many people turn to landscape designers for. But as the 56-year-old Braun puts it, “I’m just a trumpet player.
“We never could have been able to do this if I didn’t do it myself.”
Putting green. Xeriscape beds. Pergola.
Short of the infinity pool and basketball court, Braun has had a hand in designing and building most everything in the double-lot yard, during breaks in his tireless touring schedule with Jazz Attack — his smooth jazz trio with saxman Gerald Albright and guitarist Peter White — and studio work.
Braun just released his first solo vocal album of jazz standards, “Sings With Strings,” but more on that later.
Right now, he’s showing off handiwork of a different kind, including the curved deck he built off the flagstone patio of the outdoor living room.
“I wanted it curved because everything about the yard is curved,” says Braun, a tall, slender man with brow-skimming bangs who is dressed in a white embroidered shirt and black jeans on a hot summer evening.
In fact, curves shape the hot tub, opposite ends of the long, narrow solar-heated pool, and putting green (with artificial lawn) reflecting the arches of the red tile roof, and white stucco house he shares with his decorator wife, Christiane, and their two children, Emma, 11, and Kyle, 9.
But curving the front of the deck was a challenge for Braun, who hails from a family of Pennsylvania carpenters.
“It was learn as you go,” he admits. “I cut the board and then soaked it in the pool so I could bend it.”
From the deck, steps lead to a gravel walkway where fruit trees mingle with a variety of California native and succulent plants and figurative garden sculptures, which dot the landscape. There are railroad tie steps between levels.
And along the path, a small bridge crosses a river.
The river was Kyle’s idea.
“Dad, Dad, Dad, let’s build a river on the hill,” Braun remembers his son saying one day. “So I said, `OK, we’ll do this project together.’
“About an hour into digging I realize he’s gone,” he says. “He’s inside the house watching Nickelodeon. I went in and brought him back three times before I finally let it go.”
After all, Braun says, the garden is his hobby.
He often spends entire afternoons maintaining the area.
One of his favorite spots is a shady nook at the bottom of the yard, underneath a lush California pepper tree near a waterfall he chipped out of bedrock.
Across the way is another seating area that features a built-in wall fountain and pergola, which Braun built with help from hired muscle.
The finishing touch was creating the decorative ends.
“Because it was so thick, I couldn’t use a jigsaw,” Braun says. “There’s not a blade that will go through it so I had to use the Sawzall — and it worked.
“I kind of figure stuff out as I go,” he says. “I’m not afraid to try things, which is probably why I decided to sing and change my whole direction with this new CD.”
The jazz vocal album is a departure from his other work as a lyrical trumpet player who’s also provided background vocals in years past for Rod Stewart and Sade. “Sings With Strings” was produced, arranged and orchestrated by Philippe Saisse and features familiar and not-so-familiar songs, including “I Didn’t know what Time it Was,” “The Things We Did last Summer” and “Say it (Over and over Again).”
Most of the vocals were recorded in Braun’s home studio, which takes up half of what was a four-car garage.
He also recorded his flugelhorn here.
“We wanted to make a very romantic, understated record and thought that the dark, warm sound of the flugelhorn as opposed to the brashness of trumpet would pull people in,” he says.
Braun drew vocal inspiration from Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Mel Torme, as well as Anita O’Day.
“She was out of her mind good,” he says, recalling an insomniac night he stumbled on her “Sweet Georgia Brown” performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958.
It revived him.
“Whenever we just wanted to get re-inspired we’d watch that,” he says.
When asked if he plans to keep on singing, Braun doesn’t hesitate.
“This is not a side project,” he says. “This is like the hillside. this is my therapy.” to find out more about Rick Braun’s music, visit rickbraun.com.
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