I’ve written a lot about how jazz is portrayed in film, but never paid specific attention to how we jazz trumpet players have been portrayed. I decided I’d dig into the archives to see how we stacked up against other American icons like doctors, cowboys and bank dicks.
Given our association with the Devil’s Music and the high mortality rate of many of the great trumpeters, I harbored no delusions that we would be portrayed in heroic terms. I did think that we’d make out better than lawyers and politicians, but such was not the case. In fact, it would take a Physician’s Desk Reference to catalogue the dense pathologies that are the common lot of jazz trumpet players in film. I suspect there may be some kind of collective unconscious archetype underneath this, but whatever the explanation, filmmakers portray us as though we’re in the clutches of a “Trumpeter’s Curse,” some ilk of evil miasma that, instead of following the waxing and waning of the full moon, burns with a steady Freudian glow. We don’t recoil from crosses, avoid the sunlight, and sleep in coffins filled with our native soil—but just barely.
I’ll begin my analysis by noting that filmmakers apply the Curse in proportion to how Important the trumpet-playing character is in the film. So, for example, if you see a trumpeter onstage in a nightclub scene and all he does is play and has no lines, chances
