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Rex Richardson is on faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University and is one of the world’s busiest trumpeters, being featured as a guest performer in leading ensembles across the globe.

JN: Rex, welcome to the show.

RR: Thanks, James. Good to connect with you again.

JN: Get us up to speed. What’s going on in your world.

RR: I just finished 4 nights playing at a jazz club in Vienna, and am now in Norway for some masterclasses and performances. Later this month, I’ll be at Ryan Anthony’s event, Cancer Blows in TX.

The event in Vienna was kind of intimidating because many of the previous performers at the venue were on the wall. These are guys that I have the utmost respect for and was really honored to play there.

JN: Fortunately, it was just photos of those people, not the actual people.

RR: Yes, but it feels as though they are there.

JN: You’ve been all over the world, you know performance really well. But I want you to start with a story of a time when you performed and it didn’t go so well. I call this the “worst performance moment.”

RR: I can think of several. Most recently, I was performing the Hummel concerto in E natural on D trumpet. I ordinarily play it on E-flat, so this was a bit out of the ordinary. Long story short, I got to one of the moments in the concerto that is kind of tricky. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I think I got the fingerings from playing it on an E-flat trumpet confused with what I was doing on the D trumpet. So right in the middle of the piece, there was this one horrible moment.

The thing is, the rest of the performance went really well, and I don’t usually say that about one of my performances. But I’ve got the fingerings confused and I’m trying to find the right note and it’s just not happening. The effect is astoundingly comedic. At least it was to my wife as she heard it in the next room while I replayed it on youtube.

In retrospect, that one moment is funny because it was such an anomaly for myself. One other memory I have is from my college days. I was playing the opening offstage solo from the Lt. Kije Suite. This is not a difficult solo, pretty straightforward. But I was given this part when I was a sophomore at Northwestern and I just slaughtered it. I have no idea why. It wasn’t technically challenging for myself, so it was a bit of a shock. I had trouble coming to terms with why I had played so badly. Then I had to go on stage after that, and I was embarrassed. I had seemingly missed more notes than I hit.

JN: That memory is seared into your mind like a hot iron.

RR: I decided that night I was going to quit the trumpet. I was devastated.

JN: It’s a contrast between the time when you’re a young man and you don’t play that part very well, and then another time years and years later and we’re laughing about it. You can see the difference that experience and time makes in regards to a mistake happening. What do you think is the biggest difference in your mindset between those two stories?

RR: I think a lot of it has to do with how we view our current situation as a performer. If I was prone to have fingering mistakes on stage, or just forget what key I’m playing in, I might have been more uptight about the Hummel. But it was such an anomaly in a performance that otherwise I was fairly happy with. You just say, what cn you do?

But these things happen and the best you can do is dust yourself off and just keep on going.

JN: It’s another example of how experience enabled you to overcome that one mistake and play what you considered a really good performance.

RR: I learned something back when I studied with Chris Gekker at the Aspen Music Festival when I was a young boy. He told me a story about Bud Herseth, who’s famous for his consistency.