When I tell people I’m a trumpet soloist, there are three kinds of response I usually get: “Wow, what a great job!”, “Isn’t that unusual for a woman?” And “That’s jazz, right?”
And it is a great job, the best in the world, if not always the easiest when you consider you have to master hundreds of the tiniest muscles around your mouth, perfectly align your breath control and musical goals, and hold your nerve as you walk out on to the stage to perform with both precision and flair, even on the day you’ve broken your toe or your toddler is sick. Everyone knows if a trumpeter is having an off day (perhaps the tiny lip muscles – the embouchure – are bruised from the day before, or not quite feeling under control or strong enough), and a soloist is only as good as their last concert. But what a thrill it is to do this high wire act for decades.
Historically, it has been more unusual for women to play brass instruments, due to old-fashioned gender stereotypes. The trumpet is physically demanding, so it used to fall into a type of macho-sporting category of instruments. But these days mastering the trumpet is much more understood to be like the intense demands required of a ballet dancer. Extreme strength and flawless technique are essential, but that’s really just the beginning. If you can’t navigate through the mindset of “loud, fast, high” to reach your expressive and authentic self, it’s a lot of wasted effort to play this confounding piece of plumbing.
But it’s the jazz question that is interesting to me right now, as I prepare to perform Wynton Marsalis’s new trumpet concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra. Jazz seems to be the natural home for the trumpet sound in most people’s minds. But the sound of the trumpet is everywhere when you start to listen for it. It’s all over your favourite film soundtracks; it punctuates your favourite Stevie Wonder track; it fanfares every big occasion across all major religions, and has done dating back to before Tutankhamun. It’s the sound of Christmas carols in your local community (OK that’s the cornet but let’s not split hairs); it’s Miles Davis in every cool setting you can think of. And we’re not just talking about western culture here: the trumpet or an equivalent instrument is to be found in most major cultures in the world. But I believe the emergence and explosion of jazz in the last century is one of the pinnacles of human achievement.
I have spent my life devoted to classical music, but it was Dizzy Gillespie who inspired me to start playing the trumpet when I was seven. And is there a more ideal personification of the sophistication, the uncompromising intellectual rigour, the swagger or the seductive power of jazz than Wynton Marsalis? Surely the foremost living champion of jazz, he is also a prolific composer of music for symphony orchestra. His jazz opera Blood on the Fields won him the 1997 Pulitzer prize, and he wrote his acclaimed violin concerto in 2015 for Nicola Benedetti – for which she won a Grammy.
Now, finally, he has written a concerto for his own instrument, and I believe it to be the most important and impactful piece written for the trumpet in the 200 or so years since Hummel’s Concerto emerged from the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Marsalis loves the trumpet. He knows how to explore every characteristic it possesses in a way no one ever has before. His piece shows the many characters the trumpet can inhabit, and the boundaries it joyfully disregards. It is a huge physical and mental challenge and includes every possible technical difficulty, but it is written and orchestrated so well, and with a musical point behind every idea, that it’s a pleasure to play from start to finish.
The work opens with the most prehistoric horn sound imaginable – the calls of a wild elephant – which is the first time I have been required to impersonate an animal! It travels through the ancient and traditional with fanfares and ceremonial passages, as well as the highly romantic instrumental singing first introduced by Louis Armstrong. Then there’s jazz and the blues; plus Mexican flaring trumpet – a piercing metallic sound that reminds me of Uma Thurman’s character punching her way out of a shallow grave in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. There are swathes of mid 20th-century Aaron Copland-esque sounds; the music of the New Orleans church; all the trumpet mutes you can think of including Armstrong’s beloved wa-wa; the 19th-century Paris Conservatoire tradition, sounding elegant, flowery, flutelike in its delicate dexterity; and finally a virtuosic tour de force moto perpetuo: an unrestrained, relentless and accelerating charge to the end.
This epic new addition to the contemporary classical canon, soon to be found in trumpet cases across the world, is in six movements, and 35 minutes in total. That’s a long time for the solo trumpet due to the physical stamina needed – not least for those aforementioned lip muscles – but it truly flies by as a short history of the world told through the instrument. And if you were to ask me any time over the next few weeks what it’s like to be a solo trumpeter, I’d struggle to contain my excitement about this historic moment for my instrument, and tell you that it’s the easiest “job” on the planet, once someone writes the right script.
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