Trumpet player and composer Sean Hennessey’s life looks like a game of musical chairs.
In one moment, he writes and performs original music for his jazz sextet The Hennessy 6, made up of mostly world-class musicians from military bands, like the Air Force Academy Falconaires. In the next moment, he performs with and composes for Denver Brass, an elite brass chamber ensemble.
“People know me as a jazz trumpet player. I don’t get to do the solo classical thing very often, if at all. And I love it,” Hennessey said. “The problem is people see you as a trumpet player and in Denver Brass and in these groups and the assumption is you do one thing, but musically I love to do a lot of things.”
One of those other things is composing soundtracks for Hollywood films and documentaries, including horror movie docs, the surprising niche he landed after scoring 2010’s “Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy,” about the “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise.
“It’s not at all my favorite genre — I get terrified by horror films,” Hennessey said. “They called me and said we had a composer fall through, we’ve heard about you, we’ve got two weeks and it’s a five-hour documentary. Can you do it? I was scoring another feature at the time. When you’re young you can do impossible things.”
His original music now accompanies about 10 horror docs, the most recent of which, “Doc of Chucky,” which chronicles the “Child’s Play” franchise, was released this month on AMC’s Shudder, an all-horror streaming platform. Another horror doc, 2021’s “Pennywise: The Story of It,” was the No. 1 documentary in the country on iTunes for several weeks.
“He’s very thoughtful and brings a lot of interesting ideas,” said director Richard Van Kleeck, who hired Hennessey to score three of his documentaries, including “Fleeting Reality,” which was released this month on PBS stations. It follows the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers of the Louisville Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky.
“It was very moving,” Van Kleeck said. “We had different chapters, and it was like Christmas when you’re opening the file and seeing what he’s created.”
Musical back story
On a Friday afternoon, in a quiet neighborhood on Colorado Springs’ southwest side, there are no sounds of Chucky’s maniacal laughter or whispered threats threading through an eerie tune. Instead, only the faint sound of a trumpet running scales wafts on the wind outside Hennessey’s home in a quiet cul-de-sac.
Just inside the front door stands Mr. Miles, a 12-year-old Boston, Chihuahua, mini poodle mix, named after the great jazz trumpet player Miles Davis, of course. And if you’d stopped by last year, Satchmo, a Chihuahua Pomeranian, dubbed after the nickname of jazz trumpet player Louis Armstrong, would also have given you a good once over. But he’s since ascended to that great recording studio in the sky.
Hennessey’s crowded studio reflects that of a man whose life is devoted to music. There’s an old piano against one wall, and backed up to another is a keyboard, speakers and large computer monitor where he makes his movie music magic.
Across the room is a table stacked with a collection of trumpets, including an adorable piccolo trumpet. A movie poster for the Pennywise documentary is pinned to one wall, along with other memorabilia.
And there’s a framed photo of him and his mentor, the famed jazz trumpet player and composer Wynton Marsalis, who was a mentor to Hennessey for about a decade beginning in his early teens.
“When I took to the trumpet I started getting a lot of folks who wanted to help,” Hennessey said. “At a young age you become the prodigy-type musician. People got me in touch with Wynton. He said I want to have him play for me. That’s been a relationship that’s lasted my life.”
Unidentifiable instruments fill up what’s left of the space, including an unopened box containing a Chinese string instrument, a gift from his brother.
“On every birthday he sends me the weirdest instruments he can find,” Hennessey said, displaying an old silver horn of some sort. “I learned what this was at one point. I think it’s a fire horn. What used to happen is they’d go around on fire engines and before they had horns they’d play this.”
A horn gift makes sense. A decade after his arrival on the planet, Hennessey selected the trumpet as his instrument of choice and sealed his fate. Or, one could say, the trumpet chose him.
He was 3 when his family relocated to Colorado Springs from Tucson, Ariz., and by 10 he was a devoted Armstrong fan, thanks to his preference for the oldies radio station in town.
“’It’s a Wonderful World’ would come on and I loved the trumpet and how he would play it,” Hennessey said.
In Cheyenne Mountain School District 12, band wasn’t available until students were 10, which was third grade for him. They put the kids in a circle and passed around instruments, letting them give each one a try, and the music instructor would suggest which ones seemed like a good fit based on their ability to make a sound.
“I thought I hope when the trumpet comes I’m able to make something out of it and I can play that,” Hennessey said. “My folks wanted me to play sax and I was set on the trumpet.”
Fortunately, he conjured a sound from the brass instrument, as music played a large role in helping him deal with hardship — his mother got sick when he was young and stayed bedridden until Hennessey was halfway through college.
“Me and my brother each had a different way of dealing with that,” he said. “For me it was totally immersing myself in trumpet, which I took to and loved. He’s a doctor now and I’m a crazed musician.”
More like super talented. At 13 he played with Colorado Springs Youth Symphony and Denver Young Artists Orchestra and won each group’s prestigious concerto competition. The winner of the DYAO competition was rewarded with playing their piece with the Colorado Symphony, led at the time by esteemed conductor Marin Alsop. She became a fan and invited Hennessey back to play two more times at 15 and 17.
Those performances beget even bigger opportunities, including playing at Carnegie Hall in New York City after winning a national trumpet competition at 17.
“He’s a beautiful player, a melodic player,” said Cully Joyce, who played for a number of years in The Hennessey 6. “He did some studying with Wynton. You can hear some of that older style, Wynton-esque approach to things. Kind of bluesy but goes beyond that; he brings modern sounds in as well. His sound blends beautifully, his intonation is fantastic, his styling is great.”
Hennessey studied trumpet and film scoring at Northwestern University, where he did an internship at 20th Century Fox and worked on a scoring stage while director Ron Howard and composer Thomas Newman, cousin to composer and singer Randy Newman, worked on the 2005 film “Cinderella Man.”
He went on to earn a master’s certificate in scoring promotions and pictures from the University of Southern California, where he got to orchestrate an episode of the popular TV show “Lost.”
“You have a lot of power,” Hennessey said. “That’s the hardest thing to learn in this field — controlling that power. Sometimes you fall in love with something you wrote, but then what it does to the actual picture — it’s like look at me versus what you’re supposed to do which is create one piece of art, which is the film, the dialogue, the story, the visual, the acting. All of it melds into one thing. In some ways the best scores are the ones you don’t even know are there sometimes.”
Playing for keeps
After living and working for film composers in L.A. for a number of years after school, he moved back to the Springs around 2012, met his wife and had a son, who’s 4. Nowadays, he scores about five to six films every year, while composing for his own projects, like The Hennessey 6, which plays mostly original music, an unusual choice for a jazz band.
“I enjoy having my own stories to tell, as opposed to here’s an arrangement of such and such jazz standard and we hope you like it in a different time signature,” he said.
“It can be fun to do, but it becomes more analytical instead of heart-oriented. I love telling stories. It comes from my childhood and the struggle in my family with my mom bedridden. I love pieces about perseverance. I have trouble getting away from that.”
That’s the thing about Hennessey — he doesn’t stay idle or complacent. He’s now revitalizing Aries Brass Quintet, a high-level brass group founded by his trumpet teacher, Joseph Docksey, that performed around the world for three decades before falling by the wayside. But when Docksey died last year, Hennessey decided to start it back up and turn it into a nonprofit that will travel to underserved populations, such as Rocky Ford and other areas where kids and others don’t get to hear high-quality music.
“For kids to see that and understand this is an accessible thing,” Hennessey said. “I’d go into lessons and I’d play my concerto and Joe (Docksey) would say let’s work on that beginning. He’d pick up his trumpet and play and I’d say wow and see how much work I had to do. The only way to do that is have access to that. You’re not going to get that from watching a show.”
Hennessey still works at his craft, seeking perfection in his playing and connection in his composing.
“If you ask me if I’ve mastered the trumpet, that’s a journey I’ll never be done with,” he said.
“The second you stop wanting to grow and be better — what’s the point?”
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