How many trumpet players does it take to play a solo?

I am going to save my significant other the trouble of telling her favorite trumpet player joke

This is a picture of Louis Armstrong, he is one of my favorite trumpet players. I have a lot of favorites but for sure he is near the top of the list.

Playing a trumpet is mostly training to get your chops in shape, but it is also very mental. You need to have confidence to be good. Some people (ahem) might misinterpret this as being conceited, but it really isn’t that.

If you are playing in an orchestra, you get to wait around for 900 measures and then wake up and play a concert high C at fortississimo. If you aren’t a musician, this means you have to part the old lady’s hair in the back row with a 50% chance of crashing and burning. It is just you and the world, there is no place to hide. You either do it, or you don’t. If you don’t have the confidence to do this then you won’t be able to do it. Playing a trumpet in an orchestra is like being a pilot - it is hours and hours of boredom and a few minutes of pure terror.

When I first went to college, we had a concert at the parade grounds on homecoming day in the morning. As the second trumpet I had to walk out front and play an improvised solo to 16 Bars of Blues. Blues are always sequences of 12 bars but for some reason someone decided that they would write a blues song with a 16 bar cadence. I was dreading this moment for several days in the fear that I would play it so badly that people would throw tomatoes at me. Maybe I would be able to dodge one or two of them but there were hundreds of people walking around, and you never know.

I was always the second trumpet player, because I never had the endurance or lips to play the first part. But in a jazz band, the second part gets all of the solos. In an opera, the tenor always gets the girl but at the expense of getting murdered somewhere along the way. The baritone is always the bad guy, and the bass is the rube that doesn’t realize what is happening because he didn’t read the program notes. But for jazz, the second trumpet player gets the solos and can make it through unscathed and unscratched.

I learned after a while that it wasn’t an experience to be worried about, but it was an opportunity. You could go our front and tell your story. And the audience, at this point, was captive and had to listen to you.

So how many trumpet players does it take to play a solo? Five, one to play it and four to say how much better that they could have played it.