The trumpet solo on “You Can Call Me Al” is not played on a trumpet. It is Morris Goldberg on a pennywhistle, and it is one of the most recognisable instrumental hooks in eighties pop. What almost nobody notices is the horn section sitting behind it, which contains four of the best brass players in New York.
That is the pattern across a lot of these records. A jazz musician gets hired, plays something that becomes part of a song millions of people know, and the credit disappears into the sleeve notes. Sometimes they are brought in specifically to take a solo, as Freddie Hubbard was for Billy Joel.
Sometimes they are one famous name buried inside a session band. Either way, these recordings show players we mostly associate with jazz clubs and Blue Note sleeves doing something rather different, and often doing it very well.
Here are some of the most surprising times jazz trumpeters turned up on pop, rock, soul and R&B records, arranged in order of release.
Hugh Masekela on The Byrds’ “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” (1967)
The trumpet cutting through The Byrds’ single belongs to the South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela, who had left South Africa in 1960 and was building a career in the United States. It was the first use of brass on a Byrds recording, and Masekela later recalled that he played at the request of David Crosby and Roger McGuinn.
His contribution includes a featured solo. The irony of the song — a sardonic take on the manufacture of pop stardom — is sharpened considerably by having a serious jazz player deliver its most memorable instrumental line.
Randy Brecker on Bruce Springsteen’s “Meeting Across the River” (1975)
Randy Brecker’s trumpet is central to the strangest and sparsest track on Born to Run. Rather than joining a horn section, Brecker overdubbed a part that runs through the whole song and gives Springsteen’s small-time crime story most of its atmosphere.
Brecker has recalled that the part was improvised rather than written out. It is the quietest thing on an album otherwise built on wall-of-sound production, and the trumpet is doing the work that a string arrangement would do on almost any other record.
Freddie Hubbard on Billy Joel’s “Zanzibar” (1978)
52nd Street was named after the street that had housed New York’s jazz clubs in the 1940s, and the album leaned heavily in that direction throughout. “Zanzibar” made the connection explicit by bringing in Freddie Hubbard, who was then one of the most prominent trumpeters in jazz and coming off a run of records for CTI.
He gets a genuine featured role rather than a decorative one, solos included. It is one of the clearest examples of a major jazz name stepping directly into a mainstream pop recording without either side pretending to be something else.
Don Cherry on Lou Reed’s The Bells (1979)
Lou Reed’s late-seventies records were considerably odder than his reputation suggests, and The Bells is the oddest of them. Don Cherry — Ornette Coleman’s trumpeter through the run of albums that invented free jazz — appears across the record, playing over material that has more in common with art rock than with anything he had recorded before.
Reed was working with the binaural recording engineer Manfred Schunke at the time, which gives the whole album a peculiar spatial quality that suits Cherry’s playing better than a conventional mix would have.
Jon Hassell on Talking Heads’ “Houses in Motion” (1980)
Hassell had studied with Stockhausen, worked with Terry Riley and developed what he called “Fourth World” music — trumpet played through electronics until it sounds like almost anything but a trumpet.
Brian Eno brought him into the Remain in Light sessions, and his playing on “Houses in Motion” is the album’s most alien texture, which is saying something on a record built from African polyrhythms and tape loops. Anyone who knows Hassell only through his own ambient albums will find him here in front of the biggest audience he ever reached.
Dizzy Gillespie on Stevie Wonder’s “Do I Do” (1982)
By 1982 Dizzy Gillespie had been one of jazz’s most recognisable figures for nearly four decades — he had co-invented bebop with Charlie Parker in the mid-forties and spent the years since as its most public ambassador.
That did not stop Stevie Wonder inviting him onto “Do I Do”, the extended funk track included on Stevie Wonder’s Original Musiquarium I. Gillespie takes a featured solo on the full-length recording. The single edit cuts it, which means a great many people have heard the song without ever hearing him on it.
Chet Baker on Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding” (1983)
Costello had written the lyrics to a Clive Langer melody, about Falklands-era shipyard towns building the vessels that would carry local men to a war. Robert Wyatt recorded it first, in 1982; Costello’s own version, on Punch the Clock, brought in Chet Baker to play the solo.
Baker was in the last stretch of his career and his tone had thinned to something very fragile, which is precisely what the song needed. It is among the most-cited trumpet solos in British pop and it belongs to a musician most listeners knew, if at all, from Chet Baker Sings thirty years earlier.
Jon Faddis and Randy Brecker on Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al” (1986)
Neither Faddis nor Brecker takes the famous instrumental break — that is Morris Goldberg on pennywhistle. But look at the trumpet section behind Paul Simon and it becomes remarkable in its own right. Faddis and Brecker were joined by Lew Soloff and Alan Rubin, with Rob Mounsey arranging, which is an extraordinary collection of New York brass hidden inside one of the biggest pop songs of the decade.
Faddis had been Dizzy Gillespie’s protégé; Soloff had spent years in Blood, Sweat & Tears, while Rubin was a longtime member of the Saturday Night Live band.
Miles Davis on Toto’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” (1986)
Toto were at the commercial peak of a career built on studio precision, and Fahrenheit is not an album anyone files under jazz. Miles Davis plays a solo on it anyway.
He was in his Warner Bros. period, working with Marcus Miller and taking on guest appearances he would never have entertained a decade earlier, and the playing here is recognisably him: muted, spare, entirely uninterested in the chord changes going on underneath.
Miles Davis on Scritti Politti’s “Oh Patti (Don’t Feel Sorry for Loverboy)” (1988)
Miles Davis and Scritti Politti seems an unlikely pairing, but there was already a connection. Miles had recorded the band’s “Perfect Way” for Tutu in 1986, and Green Gartside’s meticulous, high-gloss pop was exactly the kind of production Miles had become interested in.
He returned the favour by playing trumpet on “Oh Patti”, recorded in 1987 and released on Provision the following year. It is one of the last studio appearances he made outside his own records.
Arturo Sandoval on Gloria Estefan’s “Tradición” (1993)
Mi Tierra was Estefan’s return to Cuban music after a decade of English-language pop, and she assembled an extraordinary cast to make it: Cachao, Tito Puente and Paquito D’Rivera among them. Arturo Sandoval appears as a guest trumpeter and featured soloist, with the credits specifically identifying his solo on “Tradición”.
Sandoval had defected from Cuba in 1990 and was three years into his American career, and the album gave him a mainstream platform that jazz alone would not have.
Roy Hargrove on D’Angelo’s “Send It On” (2000)
Hargrove was the trumpeter most closely connected to the meeting point between jazz, hip-hop and neo-soul at the turn of the century. He plays trumpet and flugelhorn on “Send It On” from Voodoo, part of a much wider circle around that album which included Questlove, Pino Palladino, James Poyser and Charlie Hunter.
The horn writing on Voodoo is loose and slightly behind the beat in a way that a straight session player would not have delivered, and Hargrove’s presence is a large part of why.
Ambrose Akinmusire on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
The most recent entry here, and the one that shows the tradition is still running. Akinmusire had won the Monk competition in 2007 and was recording for Blue Note when he appeared on To Pimp a Butterfly, alongside a wider group of jazz musicians involved in the album.
He is credited on the closing track, “Mortal Man”, alongside trumpeter Josef Leimberg.
Why it keeps happening
The through-line across nearly sixty years is that producers reach for jazz trumpeters when they want something a session player will not give them. A studio brass section plays what is written. Hubbard, Gillespie, Baker and Hargrove were hired precisely because they would play something nobody had written down, and in most of these cases the resulting part is the thing people remember about the song.
