“Was it motoring, or was it music? Which came first? I shall never know—nor do I suppose that it should matter, provided that both endure as long as I do.”
So begins L.J.K. Setright’s posthumously published autobiography,Long Lane With Turnings. He’s trying to drum up his first memory, either his father playing Fritz Kreisler on the violin, or ogling the violet dash lights of a Rolls-Royce. Setright was Britain’s most prolific auto writer, the centerpiece of an illustrious cast of characters that made CAR Magazine the world’s best buff book during the Seventies and Eighties. He was controversial in the way eccentric people tend to be, as much a poet and scholar as a journalist. The man spent his life figuring out how it all fit together, how fashion and war and progress and cars influence one another, and how they influence us. For him, music and motoring, mechanisms for delivering pleasure, were forever entwined. Brilliant as he was, Setright was still wrong about a lot of things. But this is not one of them.
So, in celebrations of that truism, we’ve merged the two in a more literal (and fun) sense. Blowing the dust off an old Cootie Williams album, sinking into a Porsche 906 at redline through Turn 1 at Laguna Seca—that’s the stuff we live for. Given our druthers, they’d be one in the same. Why not? Here, a few of our favorite trumpet players…
