10 Favorite Movie Trumpet Solos

No instrument better expresses dignity, loneliness and wistfulness in movie themes than the trumpet. For more than two decades after the arrival of talkies, movie themes were largely an orchestral affair, especially after arranger-conductors who had escaped Nazi Germany in the late 1930s went to work in Hollywood.

The exception during this period was Harry James's trumpet on Young Man With a Horn, in 1950. By 1958, when Miles Davis's moody trumpet appeared on the score of the French film, Elevator to the Gallows, Hollywood finally understood the value of jazz and the trumpet and how it could be more meaningful than the explosive brass and strings arrangements that opened most film noirs.

Yesterday, after I posted on Uan Rasey's haunting trumpet on the Chinatown (1974) love theme, many readers wrote in asking if there were others like it. So today I decided to feature my 10 favorite trumpet solos in film: 

Here's Uan Rasey on Chinatown...



Here's Jack Sheldon on The Shadow of Your Smile, from The Sandpipers (1965)...  



Here's Uan Rasey on Two for the Seesaw (1962)...



Here's Miles Davis playing as actress Jeanne Moreau looks for her husband in Paris in Elevator to the Gallows (1958)...



Here's Harry James playing Melancholy Rhapsody for the film Young Man With a Horn (1950)...



Here's an unknown trumpeter playing the solo on Jerry Goldsmith's rejected score for 2 Days in the Valley (1996). The filmmakers didn't feel it was in the spirit of the film...



Here's John Clyman playing the solo on Jerry Goldsmith's score for The Detective (1968)...



Here's an unknown trumpeter on Jerry Goldsmith's Lonely Are the Brave (1962)...



Here's Jimmy Maxwell playing The Godfather main title...



And here's Tim Morrison playing on the JFK (1991) prologue...



Bonus: Here's Malcolm McNab on TV's Lonesome Dove theme... '