Earlier this evening, had my first orchestral rehearsal since returning to New York, and I’m afraid it wasn’t pretty. Sibelius and Tchaikovsky were likely rolling in their graves at the travesty I committed upon their symphonies.

Allow me to explain: Playing most musical instruments is a bit like riding a bicycle – a few months off might leave you slighty rusty, but after a relatively short amount of practice you’d likely once again return to a reasonably high level of proficiency. Playing the trumpet, however, is a bit more like pole vaulting. Sure, there’s a skill component, but it’s also a rather physical undertaking. Tooting the horn requires strength and endurance in the small muscles of the lips, tongue and cheeks, muscles rarely called on for heavy lifting in everyday life. As a result, with too much time away, even the most technically skilled trumpeter is back to square one.

Which is, essentially, where I was upon my return from LA. Though I had brought a trumpet out with me, a number of mechanical problems with it (and, frankly, my severe lack of free time) kept me from playing nearly at all. As a result, I picked up the horn last Friday to find dodgy intonation, cracked notes, poor endurance, no upper register, and a deflated, ‘badly injured cow’ sort of tone quality. In short, I was your basic middle school trumpeter. After a week of heavy practice, I’m now somewhere near high school level, which, while representing strong progress, is still rather short of the professional proficiency my fellow musicians were expecting.

I spent most of rehearsal trying to convince myself that I was likely overdramatizing the problem; that I might not, in fact, be anywhere near as bad as I was imagining. But with my section-mates shooting me dirty looks, several violinists coming over during break to ask if I was feeling alright, and the director occasionally making comments to me such as “that’s okay, we can tune the passage up at the next rehearsal,” I wasn’t particularly reassured.

As a result, I’ll be redoubling my practice efforts between now and next week; with luck, I could even progress to sounding like a pro having a really bad day. Baby steps, baby steps.

Yes, boys and girls, come this evening, I’ll be swinging big band charts with bull dykes. Hot Lavender Swing, New York’s only lesbian big band, has called me in as solo trumpet for their annual Halloween Ball gig, and this evening is our first preparatory rehearsal. Yes, it does seem like the premise for a short-lived sitcom, but we trumpet players are apparently in short supply.

Besides, I’m not overly concerned. They like girls, I like girls. I should blend in fine.

After last week’s rather tragic concert, I today achieved musical redemption through two much happier trumpet events.

First, a rehearsal with a brass quintet I recently joined. Oddly enough, I believe I enjoy the group mainly because I’m by far the worst of the five players. I mean, these guys can play. The French horn, for example, was formerly a member of the Israel Philharmonic. Playing with the quintet is a musical kick in the butt; in chamber music there’s nowhere to hide, and with this group I have to give my all on every piece just to keep up. While I have a ways to go before moving up from the back of the bus, at several points I shocked myself with the sound coming out of my bell; without a doubt, today’s rehearsal was some of the best, some of the prettiest, playing I’ve done in my life.

Following that, I had a performance of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2 in E minor with the 92nd St. Orchestra. The piece is full of romantic period schmaltz, swelling strings, soaring brass. Beautiful in a movie score sort of way. It was one of the concerts where everything just lines up, where everyone is making music. At several points I almost missed entrances having become entirely too captivated by the group’s playing to count my rests.

On the subway home, thinking over the concert and Rachmaninov’s symphony’s enveloping richness, thinking about quintet rehearsal and the joy, the thrill of playing with such wonderful musicians, I realized that, should I ever produce a film involving a broad, lush, John Williams / John Barry sort of score, I’d have no choice but to insert myself into the studio. As third trumpet, the bottom rung of the group, so that my poor playing wouldn’t gum up the works. But still a chance to sit with the musicians and play, just play, until it’s time to go home.

1. Learn to play the trumpet.

2. Move to New York City and start playing gigs to build a reputation.

3. Eventually, get asked to play Weill’s beautiful Threepenny Opera Suite with one of the city’s more highly esteemed chamber groups.

4. During the concert, midway through the third movement in particular, have the leadpipe of your trumpet suddenly crack in half.

5. Play the rest of the concert holding together the broken leadpipe, which, leaking air, lends a lovely dying elephant timbre to your sound.

Fin.

Yes, boys and girls, I’m sure they’ll be asking me back real soon.

Yale’s big band, the swingin’ Yale Jazz Ensemble, with which I played for four years, is coming to New York for a gig. The promotional picture they’re using, however, is a bit out of date, as it still shows me at the lead trumpet stand, despite having graduated last year. Here’s a scan:

Inebriated but happy I return home, having been permanently offered the jazz trumpet chair of the big band I gigged with this evening. Like, dig.

I’m headed way uptown to play a big-band gig this evening. Mostly Thad Jones / Mel Lewis charts, with a touch of Ellington and Basie for good measure. I haven’t played with a large jazz group for nearly eight months, so it could be a little rough. Time to drink.

Trumpeter Eddie ‘Tiger’ Lewis sent out an email today about a ‘free jazz’ workshop he attended last week. I owe him a big thanks, as it was Eddie who first hipped me to the value of integrating free playing into daily practice. Frankly, I don’t really like to listen to free jazz. For my senior paper at Yale, I investigated current research on the neurobiology of music, and found, in short, that music ‘sounds good’ in large part because it caters to the preferences of a number of the brain’s pattern-finding modules. Free jazz doesn’t, and consequently usually sounds like a bunch of noise. Emotionally expressive noise, perhaps, but noise none the less.

Still, while I don’t listen to much free playing, recently I’ve been doing quite a bit. Here’s why: a jazz solo, essentially, is a spontaneously composed melodic line – temporally horizontal by nature. Traditional techniques for jazz practice, however, are largely vertical – studying a chart one chord change at a time, then slowly building up patterns through groupings of those chord changes.

Practicing free is a return to the horizontal, a taste of the effortless feeling of blowing through a line that seems to speak for itself, and a chance to explore the relationships built between notes over time. A few months practicing free has brought a melodic fluency into my fingers that seems to transfer over when I return to bebop forms, with their constrainingly complex chordal structures.

So, jazz musicians: try five or ten minutes of playing free each day for a month; you’ll be shocked at the improvement. And non jazz musicians: come hear me play this evening at Opal (10:00p, 53rd and 2nd). Sure I’m going to suck. But just imagine how bad I was before.