Earlier this evening, after breaking my Yom Kippur fast, I headed off to a brass quintet rehearsal near Lincoln Center. The rehearsal room we normally use was locked, however, and after about fifteen minutes of us all milling around outside, the trombonist suggested we head down to a rehearsal space he knew in Hell’s Kitchen. We managed to find an empty studio there, and played through a good rehearsal. At the end, as the rest of the quintet packed up their instruments, I started screwing around with a salsa riff, trying to remember a piece I had once played.

Midway through one version, a Latino guy popped his head in the door. He and another singer were recording a demo down the hall, he said, and he wanted to know if I’d be willing to sit in with their horn section. Flattered, I agreed, and followed him down to a small recording studio stuffed with twelve or thirteen musicians – a piano, a bass, an alto flute, a trombone, a guitar, two singers, and five or six percussionists – all of them Latino. Sure, I got some skeptical looks as I came in the door. But I held my own while reading down the first chart, and soon I was blending in.

Towards the end of the second chart, however, we hit an extended trumpet solo. And I tried. I really did. Still, at the end of the song, the bandleader looked up at me and said something like: “Oye ese, nex time choo take a solo, try not to play so fucking white, eh?”

Well, to be fair, he didn’t actually say that. But from his look, I was pretty sure that’s what he was thinking. And things continued to go downhill on the third song. Just before we laid it down, the pianist launched into a long instructional monologue about some changes he had apparently recently come up with but hadn’t yet had time to put in the parts. Knowing Italian, I could vaguely understand maybe half of what he was saying; the rest was completely lost. And, believe me, if you’re the only one to miss key instructions like “when we get to bar 374, even though it says to play fortissimo [wailingly loud], we’re all going to suddenly drop down to super quiet”, people will notice. And not necessarily in a good way.

Sure, things smoothed out over the next few songs. As I relaxed and fell back on the years of Latin music I’d played before, I even banged through a couple of pretty decent solos. Still, at the end of the evening, as I packed up my trumpet and shook hands with the rest of the group, it occurred to me that, no matter how much my salsa playing improves, I’m still basically just really, remarkably, painfully White.