Bugler to the Bettors

It would be tempting to say Jay Cohen has performed that signature bugle call countless times. But the fact is, Cohen has kept count during nearly a decade as the hornblower at Los Angeles-area racetracks.

By his figuring, when Cohen raised the coach horn to his lips to herald the fourth race at Santa Anita Park on Wednesday, it was the 40,000th time he has sounded the fanfare that is horse racing’s equivalent of “Gentlemen, start your engines!”

Cohen, 41, a classically trained trumpeter and former music teacher, moved from New Jersey 10 years ago to seek work as a freelance musician. But after stints in church bands and local symphonies, he has carved out instead an unusual career as a racetrack hornblower. (Yes, that’s the official name.)

The job’s not all pomp and circumstance, despite the courtly coachman’s coat and top hat.

Between races, Cohen picks up his trumpet and works the crowd, tooting Dixieland standards in the air-conditioned boxes upstairs, belting out “Tequila” for the more proletarian crowd in the general admission area below known as the Paddock Room. Cohen, equal parts entertainer and self-promoter, gamely fields requests for old ballads and boosts his local celebrity by passing out photos of himself in uniform and, every so often, signing an autograph.

“He’s added an element of public relations and even show business,” said track spokeswoman Jane Goldstein. “He really lends a festive air to what used to be basically a mundane job.”

On Wednesday, Cohen swapped wisecracks with the patrons in the comfortably appointed John Henry Race and Sports Room, teasing one 62-year-old man about his age with a few bars of “Old Man River.” Down in the noisy and smoke-filled Paddock Room, he trumpeted the theme song from “The Godfather” and “Tequila,” which always makes that crowd shout.

“I tried ‘Tequila’ once in the John Henry room and it went over like a lead balloon,” he recalled.

Cohen makes no apologies about forgoing the black-tie elegance of the orchestra pit for the hurly-burly of the track. Some professional orchestra players he knows are “counting the days till they’re retired,” Cohen said, while he’s already figuring whether he can last long enough to play his 100,000th call.

“It’s one of the few jobs in L.A. where you can play the trumpet full time,” Cohen said during a visit in his basement dressing room at the racetrack.

Cohen is part of a tiny fraternity of racetrack hornblowers--he counts about half a dozen statewide--and claims to be the only one making a full-time living at it. After Santa Anita’s race season ends each spring, Cohen moves on to Hollywood Park and plays at Fairplex Park in Pomona.

It is his combined work at all the tracks that gave Cohen so many chances to sound the racing tune, “Call to the Post.” The call, which is said to have been a cavalry call originally, later became a standard of horse racing. Such calls were used to alert the distracted party crowds that a race was about to begin.

Cohen won’t specify how much he makes but allows it’s easily double his former pay as a New Jersey schoolteacher--a “good living” for what amounts to an afternoon of hornblowing.

But he said it’s not easy stepping onto the track before thousands of spectators and whipping off a perfect horn call, just 34 notes played twice before each race. Handicappers have more urgent concerns at race time than listening for cracked notes, but Cohen approaches the task as if they were all awaiting his solo. Like anyone else in the sporting world, he even suffers slumps--like one a few years back when it seemed he was bungling a couple notes every call.

And there is the weather. In winter, Cohen employs a wooden mouthpiece for his coach horn to keep his lips from freezing, and he has played while squinting through pounding downpours. An aftershock from the 1994 Northridge earthquake rocked the racetrack as he hit the fourth note. While many fans scrambled from the stands, Cohen said, he played on.

But it’s his extracurricular role as the unofficial track troubadour that has made him a favorite with spectators, many of whom greeted him by first name as he strode through the park. Cohen said he decided to take to the crowd with his trumpet to break up the monotony of playing the same seven-second tune every half-hour. The move also represented a departure in manners for the racetrack.

His next campaign is persuading track officials to broadcast a country-western song that Cohen wrote and has shipped to tracks around the country. He’s convinced that the song, about a man who wakes up feeling lucky and speeds off to test it at the horse races, is a radio hit in the making.

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Cohen admits knowing little about horse racing, bets little and visits out-of-town parks mainly to compare notes with other hornblowers. But he’s become a keen observer of the track culture. He’s watched demographic changes in some sections and been struck by racing’s sometimes-disastrous tug on rich and poor alike.

“I’ll see people decked out in more jewelry than I wear in a year and right behind them somebody . . . in tatters,” Cohen said.

But most important for Cohen, this disparate crowd and--its varied musical tastes--also happens to be the focus of his musical career.

“This is not a steppingstone for me. This is my job,” he said. “I want to retire from it. I love this job.”