HORN CALL

posted by James Reel

    A little under the weather, I took yesterday off from the airwaves. Even so, I managed to do two phone interviews and crank out a couple of short articles for a future issue of the Tucson Weekly. One of those interviews was with Jacquelyn Sellers, who is leaving her position as principal hornist with the Tucson Symphony after more than 20 years.
    She told me that, besides wanting to follow her partner to Southern California, she’s just tired of being in the hotseat. The horn has a lot of beautiful, highly exposed solos, which is nice except that it’s a treacherous instrument, and if you crack a note—and crack you will—everybody knows it.
    Sellers said that she’s planning to ease off horn playing for a while, maybe enroll in massage school when she gets to SoCal. She brushed off notions that she’ll be hard to replace at the TSO. “There are a lot of good players out there,” she said. “They won’t have any trouble finding some young hotshot who’ll blow everybody away.”
    Quite likely, but that doesn’t mean that Sellers won’t be sorely missed.