For Trumpeter Jack Sheldon, Success Can’t Cure Stage Fright

Jack Sheldon, the brilliant-toned trumpeter who also sings with a gleaming tenor and loves to tell funny stories, is having lunch in a Van Nuys Thai restaurant. He is discussing such career high points as the formation of his new big band and his appearance in the 1991 film “For the Boys,” when the subject of Harry Connick Jr. comes up.

“Oh, I think he’s great. He’s so hip, so confident, and at that age,” said Sheldon, talking with a smile of the singer who is in his mid-20s. “When I was his age, I was shaking when I played. I’d get up stage with Shorty Rogers or Dave Brubeck, and I’d be shaking. I’m overcoming it. I feel better now.”

You would think that after 40 years in show business and a resume that includes his own TV show--”Run, Buddy, Run” in the ‘60s--a 16-year stint on the now-defunct “Merv Griffin Show” and many records under his and others’ names, Sheldon would feel comfortable with his musicality. But he said he just doesn’t have that kind of personality.

“I worry. I worry if the talent will come through, and what the audience will think,” said Sheldon, a native of Jacksonville, Fla., who has lived in Hollywood for decades. “Everything you could worry about, I worry about. I’m like the joke about the Jewish waiter who asks, ‘Is anything all right?’ ”

Well, a lot is, at least career-wise. At this point in his life, Jack Sheldon, a young-looking 60, is on a roll.

He played a bandleader in “For the Boys,” which starred Bette Midler and James Caan, and he has just completed the soundtrack for the Billy Crystal vehicle “Mr. Saturday Night,” which is being released Friday. On the score, he delivered trumpet solos in front of a 100-piece orchestra conducted by the film’s musical director, Mark Shaman.

Sheldon’s big band, which appears Monday at Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood, just completed its first recording, and his latest Concord Jazz album, “On My Own,” is due out in a month. And he’s working steadily, performing Sundays at JP’s The Money Tree in Toluca Lake, and with regularity at other Southern California venues.

In spite of all this, Sheldon continues to have his share of stage fright. He isn’t sure why he still gets nervous, but, he said, “music is more demanding than just about anything.”

He added, “If you don’t practice, it’s just not there. But if you do, it is. Unless I practice three or four hours, I feel lousy.”

The trumpeter has plenty of material to practice. For the past four or five years, Sheldon, for the first time, has been taking lessons. His teacher is Uan Rasey, a top studio musician. “In jazz, I pretty much taught myself, and in the studios, I had an emotional style” that for years was in vogue, Sheldon said. But today, a more legitimate, precise approach is being called for, and for quite a while Sheldon couldn’t play that way.

“I was doing a TV soundtrack with Shorty Rogers, and when I couldn’t play the solos the legitimate way they wanted, Warren Luening, a wonderful player, was called in, and I was really hurt,” Sheldon recalled. “So I realized I had to learn how to play properly. I asked Uan to teach me, and he started me playing correctly. I had developed my own approach, which was all wrong.

“Now when I’m at Uan’s, any time I miss a note, or come in under pitch, he stops me,” Sheldon said. “Uan keeps making the standards higher and higher, and I’m really learning how to play.”

The effort has paid off. The trumpeter said that on the soundtrack for “Mr. Saturday Night,” “they wanted something more legitimate, and I could do it.”

Some of his colleagues think he’s always been first-rate--Brubeck among them. “Jack’s great, and I thought he was great when he used to sit in with me in the ‘50s,” said the noted pianist from his home in Connecticut.

In considering his current flurry of activity, Sheldon cites his big band, which he formed after his stint on “For the Boys,” as the experience he most relishes. “I like working with other people, but when you have your own band, it’s your own thing,” he said.

Sheldon’s debut with the ensemble at Catalina about six months ago was not a night without pitfalls. “It was really exciting,” he remembered. “Sally Kellerman sat in front of the band for an hour and a half, but I forgot to invite her up, I was so excited. I do it a lot better now.”

In front of a big band, Sheldon not only plays trumpet in a bold Louis Armstrong-influenced style, he also sings plenty of tunes and tells a joke or two. He started singing as a child, pretending a Tinkertoy trumpet was a real instrument, but it wasn’t until he joined Benny Goodman in 1959 that he began singing in earnest.

“I love singing,” Sheldon said. “I love being able to say the words and use my own body as an instrument. There’s nothing like it. Because if you really get hold of a note and you can sing it, you feel this power.”

The thought of Goodman brought up fond recollections. “Benny was really good to me, and he was terrible to me, too,” Sheldon said, smiling again. “For months after I joined him, he’d stop the band whenever I made a mistake. If we were in a concert, he’d do it. Then one day we were doing a record date in New York and he stopped the band and asked me, ‘Who invented that style you’re playing?’ and I said, ‘I did. You like it?’ Then everybody cracked up, and after that he didn’t pick on me anymore.”

Sheldon, a former alcoholic and drug abuser who has been sober for seven years, is never far away from a joke.

“Getting laughs is a thrill,” he said. “It’s also a way to say things that are important that you can’t say other ways. Like during the L.A. riots, I said, ‘We’re truly a divided city: smoking and nonsmoking.’ That’s a really serious subject, but humor’s a way to talk about it.”

Of course, some things are beyond humor. Like when his daughter died in a small plane crash on her way back from Mexico 13 years ago.

“That’s a tough one,” Jack Sheldon said.

Jack Sheldon, with pianist Ross Tompkins, plays 9:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. Sundays, at JP’s The Money Tree, 10149 Riverside Drive, Toluca Lake, no cover, no minimum. Information: (818) 769-8800. Sheldon leads his big band at 9 and 11 p.m. Monday at Catalina Bar & Grill, 1640 N. Cahuenga Blvd . , Hollywood. $12 cover, two - drink minimum. Information: (213) 466-2210.