Living the Life of a Jazz Man THE FREE PRESS

A psychedelically painted oval of wood sits in Greg Hopkins’ living room high above Nowell Street. Greens and blues swirl along undulating lines and fade into a textured background.

“You see the octopus and the crab in there?” Hopkins asks hopefully, gleefully. “You see the tentacle and the carapace? He’s having him for lunch.”

To the casual observer the painting looks like colorful confusion, but Hopkins’ passion for the abstract is his stock in trade. He is one of the foremost jazz musicians, composers and arrangers in New England and has played with a who’s who of musicians including Dizzy Gillespie, Marvin Gaye and Ella Fitzgerald.

If you walk along Nowell Street before breakfast on just about any morning of the week you’ll hear the abstract become musical reality. Hopkins practices trumpet two hours every morning, as he has for several decades. He currently owns ten of the instruments.

“Got to keep your (mouth) muscles in shape,” Hopkins says with the grin that punctuates most of his pronouncements.

A gold front tooth jumps out from his smile, and the goatee that has adorned his chin for half of his 48 years is reminiscent of beatnik jazz musicians of the 1950s.

Hopkins is also hyperkinetic. In an hour in his living room he never stopped rocking in his chair, tapping his leg and bobbing his head. In his mind the abstract connects with the pragmatic, and he makes music, a high-voltage occupation.

“I hear the song before I write it,” Hopkins said. ‘Sometimes it all comes out in one sitting, sometimes it takes months to get it right, but I usually get it.”

Since he was 8 years old, a good chunk of his energy has been channeled through the three valves a trumpet.

In the beginning it was an accident that got him hooked on the instrument. Hopkins was growing up in Detroit, surrounded by the then-burgeoning Motown sound, when he started playing the clarinet. One day, when he was running with a glass milk bottle filled with soapy water to wash his bike, the 8-year-old Hopkins fell onto the pavement and cut his hand. Glass sliced the tendons in his pinkie, rendering it forever crooked, useless for the far-flung valves of the clarinet and sax.

“But my dad, he looked at me, and he said, ‘It’s perfect for the hook on the trumpet,” Hopkins said. That was 40 years, thousands of concerts, songs, and tours ago.

In the busy season Hopkins plays eight to 10 shows a week with theater groups, jazz sessions and anything that feels good. He also teaches courses at Berklee like “Post Bebop Harmonic Innovations” and plays, composes and arranges for the Greg Hopkins Big Band, a 16-piece big band that plays at the Averof on Sunday afternoons from 1-4 p.m. The sound is powerful, crisp and luxurious.

“Big band is magnetic. It has really faded, but it will never die,” Hopkins says with the zeal of the converted. “The sound is way too magnetic.”

Hopkins got magnetized early. Growing up in Detroit in the ‘60s was all the head start he needed to get him on his way. By the time he was in high school he was playing in the horn section for some of Motown’s rising stars. He went on to study jazz at Michigan State and veered away from a more conservative career as a classical musician because “I kept playing jazz all the time.”

His career has been remarkably successful, and his litany of musical achievements is impressive even to the uninitiated. Beginning with a two-and-half-year tour with the Buddy Rich Orchestra, Hopkins has seemingly played everywhere and with everyone including the Temptations, Lena Home, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, The Supremes, The Boston Symphony and a long list of others. But at this juncture in his career Hopkins considers his versatility as a composer and arranger his greatest strength.

“You have either one of two things in this business, incredible talent or versatility. I have versatility.”

This year Hopkins has been to Spain and will be going to Belgium and Alaska this spring and summer. He typically travels three months a year.

But he has lived in Melrose since 1974, two years after he came through Boston for the first time on a tour.

How did Hopkins decide he wanted to live near Boston?

“I like the vibe of this town,” he said.