Colbert’s Trumpet Player on Life After Late Night
Viewers across the country are counting down the days till the final episode of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,” which will air on May 21st. When the program’s peculiar, sudden cancellation was announced, last July, the members of the show’s band, Louis Cato and the Great Big Joy Machine, were as surprised as anyone. “It felt like a deep sigh,” Jon (Lamps) Lampley, the group’s trumpet player, recalled the other day, at a sushi place near the Ed Sullivan Theatre.
CBS defended the cancellation as “purely a financial decision.” But many linked it to Colbert’s criticism of the network’s parent company for paying sixteen million dollars to settle a lawsuit with President Donald Trump—a move that the host decried, on air, as a “big fat bribe.” Lampley, who is thirty-six and wears a neat beard, said, “I don’t really have a lot of interest in fuelling speculation.” He is unhappy, though, about how things went down.
Colbert already has his next gig lined up: writing a “Lord of the Rings” movie with his son Peter McGee and Philippa Boyens. Lampley, meanwhile, will release his second solo album in June—a joyous soul-pop record called “Notes to Self,” whose lead single, “Greener,” features a spoken-word cameo from Colbert. (“Hey, Lamps, how’s your day goin’?”) On the album, the trumpeter levels up as a singer and front man. “It was influenced by the gospel music that’s at the core of what I do,” he said.
Lampley grew up in the predominantly white suburb of Tallmadge, Ohio, but he attended the First Apostolic Faith Church, a Black, Pentecostal congregation in Akron. In seventh grade, he joined the church band. He rattled off the names of various sisters and elders he performed alongside. “Nobody knows who these people are, but they are the ones who taught me, This is what music is,” he said. “This is how you move people. This is how you play the guitar in a way that gets an entire church to clap their hands.” Lampley maintains a deep faith.
He went on to play sousaphone in the Ohio State University marching band, where, as a senior, he experienced one of his proudest moments: “dotting the i” in an on-field cursive formation of the word “Ohio.” “This is considered a very great honor,” he said. During college, he also co-founded a jazz-funk band now known as the Huntertones. In 2014, the band moved to New York, where Lampley connected with the keyboardist and singer Jon Batiste, who hired him for the band he was assembling for Colbert. Batiste left the show in 2022, and the musician Louis Cato was promoted to bandleader.
“I can’t believe that I chose to make my life out of, like, blowing through a metal pipe,” Lampley said. “The Late Show” was taping that afternoon, and he made his way to the theatre for wardrobe, hair, and makeup. Later, between Colbert’s interviews with Anne Hathaway, who zinged her “Devil Wears Prada” co-star Stanley Tucci about his foodie persona (“That bitch has not made me a morsel!”), and the comedian Josh Johnson, who recounted an amusing T.S.A. encounter (“They open my bag, and it wasn’t brass knuckles—it was toe spreaders”), Lampley showed off his chops, soloing on a rendition of the Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle.”
At the taping, Colbert, hands in pockets, addressed his trumpet player. “Lampley, I want you to know that a friend of mine came to the show last night,” he said. “And she said, ‘Wooo, that trumpet player.’ ” Colbert grinned. “She goes, ‘If I wasn’t happily married, he’d be in big trouble.’ ” The audience whooped.
“You know what it is?” Cato interjected. “It’s the hips.”
“I think that’s it,” Colbert said. “Or it’s the embouchure.”
“Or it’s both,” Lampley said. He illustrated his lipping technique.
“You’re always, like, pre-kissing,” Colbert observed.
Afterward, Lampley and the band’s saxophonist, Louis Fouché, headed to an Italian restaurant. Lampley brought up the exchange involving Colbert’s friend, which ended up being cut before air. “Man,” he said, “I was grateful that my girlfriend was not at the taping today.”
The impending end of the Colbert era was weighing on them all. “Somebody who has been that important to the game and to the craft deserves to go out on their own terms,” Lampley said. “And that was taken from Stephen.” ♦