Trumpet

Written by Jackie Kay

Narrated by Cathleen McCarron

When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.

The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unbeknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a woman living as a man. The discovery is most devastating for their adopted son, Colman, whose bewildered fury brings the press to the doorstep and sends his grieving mother to the sanctuary of a remote Scottish village.

Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, Trumpet by Jackie Kay is a starkly beautiful modern classic about the lengths to which people will go for love. It is a moving story of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, of loving deception and lasting devotion, and of the intimate workings of the human heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W. F. Howes Ltd
• Release date: Feb 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781407497464

Jackie Kay

Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh. A poet, novelist and writer of short stories, she has enjoyed great acclaim for her work for both adults and children. Her novel, Trumpet, won the Guardian Fiction Prize. She has published three collections of stories with Picador, Why Don’t You Stop Talking, Wish I Was Here, and Reality, Reality; two poetry collections, Fiere and Bantam; and her memoir, Red Dust Road. From 2016-21 she was the third modern Makar, National Poet for Scotland. She lives in Manchester and is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Salford.

Reviews for Trumpet

[kyuuketsukirui · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an excellent book. Great story. Brilliant writing. I'm keen to read her other books now, but they're kind of hard to find. The characters were great. It's interesting (and I didn't even think of this until just now) that both this and Chuck Palahniuk's Rant, which I read right before this, are stories about dead people, told by various different characters. They are really similar in a lot of ways. And in both, it's strange how Rant and Joss are so real, so there, even though it's just other people remembering them. I loved Millie. I loved May Hart, the old school chum, and how different what was happening in her head was from how Sophie saw it. I loved her crush on Josie and how seeing the photo made her miss her and how she was suddenly jealous of Millie. Her bit was only like three or four pages, but I loved her so much (she was maybe my favorite character!). Sophie was horrid. I mean really horrid. Reading the Sophie parts, I wanted to strangle someone (preferably Sophie). Colman was a brat, but he came round in the end. And even when he was a brat, I was still sympathetic to his sense of betrayal. I liked all the odd little characters like the undertaker and the death certificate guy. I liked Joss's mum. I loved Joss's letter at the end.I just love this book so, so much.

[Jenny Cooke · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A wonderfully written and narrated story about identity, jazz, family and grief.

[m.belljackson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Promising plot waylaid by too much introspection excusing all the years of lies.For no good reason, trumpeterJoss Moody and Millie drop their major betrayal on their adopted son, Colman.Readers may well wish he just took the richly well deserved money for the book and relaxed into a new life.Sophie Stone's exploitation of his grief translates into a release from his desire for revenge.The many perspectives of Moody's death are pretty depressing, with Big Red the outstanding character.While we wonder why Joss never retuned to fully care for his aging Mother, we may still hope that Colman goes back to help her instead of placating his Mother .Readers will want to hear that storybook TRUMPET play!!!Descriptions of house and dark and land and sea and moon and wind in Torr are compelling.

[pilgrimjess · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.”The opening sentence of this novel reads "I pull back the curtains an inch and see their heads bent together." but who are what are they? We soon learn that the speaker is a woman and the heads she views are members of the press camped outside her home. So what great crime has she committed to afford this attention? She spent many years married to a famous Jazz trumpeter called Joss Moody who despite being born a woman has lived most of her life as a man. A fact only discovered by everyone else on his deathbed. However this isn't Joss's story. Instead it is the story of those his death has left behind namely his widow, Millie, and his adopted son, Colman. It is the story about identify and how people are seen by a wider audience. Joss was black, Millie white, both Scots who lived most of their lives and brought up their son in London. The book is actually based on a true story that of Billy Tipton a famous American jazz musician in the 1940's.Most of the novel is based around Millie whose grieving is movingly portrayed. Colman in contrast feels betrayed by both his parents as he had no idea that Joss was really a woman until being shown by a funeral parlour owner and perhaps understandably is angry. In his anger he is befriended by an unscrupulous journalist seeking to write an expose about Joss the woman. She sees Joss as a sort of freak that will excite the public in the process making her rich yet to his friends and fellow band members although they at least profess ignorance (it is never quite clear whether or not they secretly knew) are happy to purely accept Joss at face value which ultimately is what Colman also does. Racism both actual and implied are also touched upon but quite sensitively. At one stage Colman boards a train expecting there to be an issue with his seat or his ticket purely of his colour because that is what he has been conditioned to believe from past experience at the hands of whites. Therefore this is a book about love, gender, grief, race and honesty but mainly it is a book about identity. Identity for all of of us is what we chose it to be rather than what others think that it should be. For a first novel it was a very admirable one that had plenty going for it.

[brokentune · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive."

What makes up identity?

Is it your family?
You accent?
Where you're born?
Where you're raised?
Is it what you do?
Is it how you do it?
Is it the clothes you wear?
Is it your age?
Is your gender?
Is it who you fall in love with?
Is it who you respect?

Trumpet is a beautiful investigation into the question of how people derive a sense of identity under circumstances which seem to strip the members of the Moody family of all of the certainties they may have once held to be indestructible.

Jackie Kay wrote this poetic novel around Joss Moody, a fictional jazz musician, whose death leaves his family at a loss after a lifetime of constructing their own image of themselves in relation to Joss, their respective husband and father.
More than that, Kay beautifully describes how their grieving process helps them to figure out who they are.

"I was a traditional boy in an untraditional house. I was always going about the place freaked out and embarrassed. My parents were not like other people’s parents. Whenever they came to my school they stuck out like a sore thumb. I don’t know what it was. A different life makes people look different. Even their skin. Their clothes were more glamorous. They didn’t look like they worked a nine to five. I wanted parents that looked like they worked a nine to five. It was bad enough with all that jazz never mind this. My life was unconventional. A lot of my childhood was spent on the road. Touring. Place to fucking place. I’d have been happier at home watching Star Trek with a bowl of cornflakes. Too much, it was. All that razzamatazz. Other kids envied me and I envied other kids. That’s it."

[daniexj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An interesting book. Joss Moody is the main character, though he's dead when the story starts. He was a world famous trumpeter (hence the title) from Scotland. His story is told mostly by his wife Millie and his adopted son Colman. But there are short little parts by others that were in Joss' life as well, his house cleaner, the Doctor who signed his death certificate, the funeral director who prepared Joss as well as his drummer.The drummer character was my favorite by far, even though we only got a short chapter from his point of view. He and Colman were the only two characters that had really unique voices (although Big Red, the drummer, was a great character on the page, while Cole was a douche and an idiot). The rest of the characters, even the journalist Sophie, all sorta read the same unfortunately. And since it was literature (and therefore quotes were barely used) sometimes who was speaking was hard to determine.Still, on the whole it was a well written and intricately woven piece of fiction that always had the reader guessing just a bit. I just sorta wish that Joss being dead didn't have to be present to make the book work. With Joss alive... That would have been a cool book too.

[vcocco_5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"All children of lovers are orphans.""She took the pen carefully and looked at it, twirling it around slowly as she did so. Then she wrote her name in the registrar's entries of death book on the anointed line. She looked as if she was praying as she wrote. He looked over to see if her writing was as lovely as he was expecting it to be. It was; she had a beautiful hand. The woman smiled at him. The intimacy between them had been like love. Mohammad would miss her. She said, "Thank you," to him. She put the certificate and official papers in the Please Do Not Bend envelope that she had brought with her. She paid the fee for her own copy of the death certificate which she looked at before putting it away, as if to check if everything was all right." "The trouble with the past, my father said, is that you no longer know what you could be remembering."

[luli81_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The story of Joss Moody, a jazz trumpetist who holds a secret only known after his death.

[clurb · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This one left me feeling a bit 'meh'. Although this book sets out to deal with the themes of gender and sexuality in a way that is not so commonly touched upon, some characters were more believable than others and I eventually found that I couldn't care less about any of them. Which spoilt things a bit for me.