Jackie Kay’s ‘Trumpet’ tells the story of Glaswegian jazz musician, Joss Moody: a talented trumpeter who led a curious double life.
The story begins with his death (circa 1997), and recollections made by his wife, Millicent. Immediately, the reader is presented with a worrisome Millie fretting over her being ceaselessly hounded by the local press of Torr. The reader isn’t immediately told why she is being hounded, although the likelihood is that it regards the fact that Joss was a brilliant musician.
As the story progresses, Millie recounts how she first came upon Joss in the early 50s: she was intrigued by his style, his way, his looks, and his manner. After several brief encounters – one of which occurs in a blood donors’ hall - Millie picks up the courage to ask him out. They court for three months, often going to jazz clubs in Glasgow, and Joss always does no more than peck Millie on the cheek before walking home alone.
One date, however, holds something different in store; Millie invites Joss up, and Joss accepts. They kiss, but Joss becomes reticent. In a delicate moment, Joss reveals something very private: he takes off his shirt and two t-shirts and reveals a layer of bandages wrapped around his chest. After delicately removing them, the first of two small, firm breasts is revealed to Millie: Joss is a woman, after all.
Millie, however, is deeply in love with Joss: she loves his music, his looks, his way; they marry in a fit of passion, and keep Joss’s secret secret from everyone they encounter thereafter. Soon into the marriage, though, relationship pains start to show: Millie wants a baby. Joss is deeply conflicted about not being able to give Millie a child, and in one fit of rage hits her. They compromise, however, and adopt a young boy, renaming him ‘Colman’.
Following Millie’s recollections, Colman goes to the mortuary to see Joss’s dead body. The coroner is confused by the Report of Death: where ‘male’ was written, there is now ‘female’. After unwrapping the bandages, his confusion is lifted: Joss is female. When Colman arrives, he’s confronted by the coroner – who stumbles over his words, before saying, finally, that his father is, in fact, a woman. Colman thinks he’s playing a cruel joke and grabs him by his collar, shaking him. After Colman calms down, he’s shown the body. In disbelief, he feels shocked, betrayed; he storms out of the morgue and leaves immediately for his London home.
In the next chapter, Colman goes over his past. The language he uses is quite coarse, with some Scottish colloquialisms. He seems short, and often doesn’t carry thoughts on for very long. His dialogue is full of warm reminisces which are cut short by the venom he now feels for his father; he feels alienated and alien, and he feels his father is equally shapeless and unknowable. In his confusion and hate, he consults a journalist named Sophie Stones. He wants to write a book about the life of his father, and he’s been promised an £8,000 advance.
After the headlines disappear, Millie feels slightly more secure, but, by now, she’s heard about dozens of book proposals and is utterly torn up by them. She wonders who could be in on them – which of her ‘friends’ have betrayed her. She rules out certain people, like ex-band members. She knows Colman is in on one, though, and she feels deeply hurt by it.
At certain points in the book, Millie goes over Colman’s youth. The family was happy, but Colman seemed much closer to Joss. Millie would often lose control with young Colman after one of his many long sulks and hit him. Joss would be the intermediary and help soothe Millie, telling her that it wasn’t Colman’s fault. Millie couldn’t understand why her attitude towards Colman could oscillate so often between strong feelings of love and hate.
As the story progresses, we hear testimonies – some unrelated to the book proposal – from some of Joss’s friends and associates. One very touching testimony comes from ‘Big Red’ – a drummer in the ‘Joss Moody Trio’. He tells how some fans would often question Joss’s general character – unsure of his slightly high-pitched voice and laugh, and his effeminate, ‘pudding’ face. Many times, Big Red would hit anyone who questioned Joss’s character (but he’d always apologise by dusting them off and buying them a glass of scotch).
When Big Red is contacted by Sophie Stones, he divulges some information but he goes cold when he becomes privy to the purpose of the call – he could never betray Joss. ‘It’s all about the music,’ he says. The past is the past; he couldn’t care less if Joss turned out to be a woman – it doesn’t change a thing. His language is much more coarse than Colman’s, with many colloquialisms, but it’s somehow quite endearing and full of character – whereas Colman’s seems devoid of feeling.
One scene following this beautifully contrasts with Millie’s feelings of being betrayed: Sophie contacts an ex-cleaner of the Moody family named Maggie. Maggie invites Sophie in, and decides that she’ll help after contemplating the fact that Colman is involved in the book proposal. She tells Sophie a few things, often coming across in a harsh way – one time she says that their house was often filthy, without knowing why. Towards the end of their conversation Maggie says that she once found a letter of Joss’s signed ‘Josephine’ (Joss’s actual name is ‘Josephine Moore’) but was never suspicious. Sophie leaves, leaving £500 on Maggie’s coffee table. She doesn’t wave to Maggie as she leaves (a trait that she repeats throughout the book). Maggie tries hiding the money in different places; the guilt soon starts to show.
Colman gets in contact with Joss’s mother, Edith Moore (97). He’s never met her, and she has no idea that Joss is dead – or that she became a he (albeit an artificial ‘he’). He can’t pluck up the courage to tell her the truth so he says that he’s a ‘friend’ of Joss. Edith treats Colman to lunch and supper, and presents him with a suitcase full of letters that Joss had sent her throughout his life. Colman soon begins to have doubts about the book.
Meanwhile, Sophie is interviewing a school friend of Joss named May Hart. At the end of their conversation, Sophie tells May that Josephine took up the identity of a man later in life. May can’t believe it, but Sophie hands her a picture of Joss redolent in a blue suit, playing his trumpet. She eyes it for what seems an eternity and begins to cry because of the beauty of it. Sophie, however, puts it down to ‘betrayal’ – which will fit in nicely with her perversion-oriented book; after all her words about the book potentially ‘helping people’ we can see clearly that it’s intended to appeal to the 90s subculture of sleaze.
Colman leaves Sophie asleep at a Glasgow hotel, leaving her a note, and visits Millie – alone. As Millie goes to meet him at the harbour bus station, a bird flies close to her head, ‘scatting in the wind’. What’s the message of the book? It seems to be that love – romantic or platonic – can overcome the harshest of realisations, no matter how shocking or peculiar they might be. Jackie’s novel is tender and delicate, the characters are powerful, the layout is telling (the chapters are named as if part of a book draft), and the language is fierce and uncompromising.
Written by Robert Head.
An alternative review (http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/books/trumpet.html):
The protagonist of Jackie Kay's first novel, Trumpet, is dead before the story begins. He is Joss Moody, a black Scottish jazz trumpeter, who has left a wife in deep mourning, and an adopted son, the defiantly ordinary and untalented Colman, in deep shock. For the posthumous medical report has revealed Joss Moody, his tall and handsome father, revered in the jazz world, to be a woman. Joss's widow, Millie, holes up in a Scottish fishing village in a house she and her husband shared, reeling from the press coverage of her marriage and overwhelmed by grief. Colman meanwhile, raging against what he perceives as his father's duplicity and perversion, colludes with tabloid journalist Sophie Stones in a facile and sensationalist rewriting of Moody's history. Trumpet is, in itself, the other side, or sides, of the story it is told in a multitude of voices. There is Millie, whose faintly sepia-toned reminiscences conjure the romance and charisma of Moody; Colman, whose narrative strains with expletives and inarticulate anger; Big Red McCall, his fiercely loyal drummer; the doctor, registrar and funeral director who all literally and figuratively expose Moody; and a host of neighbours and other minor characters, all struggling to balance their memories and perceptions of Moody with the lurid revelations. The skill of the novel is that these disparate voices are given weight and import, and that the reactions of the various characters, although they encompass disgust and prurient curiosity, are never predictable. Even such a minor character as the confused registrar, who in a lesser novel might just be used as a plot-driving mechanism, responds to Millie's feelings as widow with delicacy and deference.
Millie observes that Joss spoke of his female self in the third person: the female self was his third person, an alternative self. But as Trumpet unravels, it becomes apparent that Moody wasn't alone in exploring and creating alternative selves. Millie is a faithful, conventional and deeply loving wife, who, in colluding with Moody's reconstruction of his sexual identity, led what in some respects was a bizarrely unconventional life. The very milieu that Moody inhabited was mocked by the young Colman as a construct: the jazzmen, with their way-out names and boozy lifestyles, trying to recapture the world of long-dead Dukes and Counts. But Colman himself, the brutal realist, always refers to his father as "he", in his angriest moments never quite angry enough to give up on his "Daddy". Whether Moody has lived a fiction or created an alternative reality in becoming a man is the riddle at the heart of this subtle and humane novel, which Colman must explore to have any hope of resolution.
Review written by Helena Smith.
