HERE AM SOUNDING

By

Stevie Davis

The first domesticated musical instrument is the trumpet. Because historians on the subject are uninventive and not a little coy, the trumpet’s first master remains unnamed by our annals. A lot of grown men still snicker whenever they read our annals. In its own way, this too is beautiful. Like the trumpet itself.

The cornet, by contrast, is not a true life form. It does not possess the attributes that science demands of an instrument before conferring life upon it. It cannot reproduce its own shepherd’s crook voice. And when it cries, it cries like a lost sheep pissing on a flat rock, not like a woman or a professional football coach. It is legal, then, to terminate a pregnancy if the baby is a cornet. A trumpet, however, is the type of instrument which requires a delicate balance of nature and nurture to perform its function of weeping like a goddamned man, baby.

Properly raised, the trumpet can become so adept at responding to human cues that for a long period of our history, trumpets were used in lieu of dogs for hunting and cattle for companionship. In the Old West, which manifest has made merely middle, trumpets were used to hunt wild cows which pillaged the freshly planted rows of cornet stalks. For a time in the last century, trumpets even replaced birds as the marquis members of nursing home aviary displays. The old women blinked silently at the flittering brass horns and shook hands with the sounds the old men couldn’t hear for their weeping.

Some say the trumpet mocks the human voice. Others say it merely mimics. One way or the other, the human voice has it coming.

In 1956, a Pittsburg man identified in reports only as Roy Edlridge was attacked by a poorly reared trumpet. The trumpet was terminated. Later, Mrs. Eldridge gave birth to a litter of one thousand beautiful one pound forty-four ounce Creole cornets. Some say she was a real cunt, that Mrs. Eldridge. But it doesn’t translate well into English. Not as well as, say, the word cornet. It loses some of its punch. Paunch. I mean it looses some of its paunch. Which is okeh. Fat people in America are not as offensive as fat people other places, like wherever the hell they speak English.

In England, though, cunt is not a very bad word. Although to refer to a woman’s cornet, even if you believe - as Ray Ulrich did - that all women are queens, is frowned upon. By God. England is frowned upon. With the exception of zoo pieces, the trumpet does not live anywhere in the British Isles. Or England, for that matter. St. Patrick Fitzroy the Elder drove the trumpets out of England. For this he was memorialized on little prayer cards - distributed even today throughout the isle of Ayiti - as the Vodou mistè Dumballa, the trumpet lwa. Lwa, or spirits of syncretism, can be hot or cool. Arbiters of the hot lwa style include Royal Elderberry. Cool lwa are often represented by images of Art Farmer casting the chet bakers out of the 2nd story window of the Prins Hendrik Hotel, Amsterdam - which in the painting looks a lot like Council Bluffs.

“1 Thessalonians, Chapter 4”, verses 13 through 18, on the album The Bible, by God, featuring Paul, Silas and Timothy, is the first recorded trumpet in the annals of mistè. But we am a broodoo chile of hip hop. So from the suburbs of Omaha straight to Yale, Oklahoma, with a big shout out to my ‘neck Bix Biederbecke and all the Davenport family, our anthem is “Fuck Pittsburg ‘56” as played on roving packs of feral trumpets. Like us, they breed only in the honey moon of Haiti and their numbers grow every day until all the world will hear them mocking our chorus. One hundred and forty four thousand and one is the number of trumpets which will enter the kingdom of heaven. Play us then the dead waltzes, the odd Donegal mazurka and the Twelfth Street Rag.