Trumpets Sound, Shimmering Sound

Daniel De Gruchy-Lambert on a Tuesday in Brum

It had been raining on Tuesday morning. The homeless people had already queued for their porridge, bacon sandwiches and coffees in Pigeon Park. A woman called Gemma, with no top teeth, had already dumped her bin bag of belongings on a wet slab and invested in a conversation about how boring and dangerous life on the streets had become. She had already shaken her head and admitted to giving herself in to the police just to get a place in prison. It was nice in there, she had said. Get up, work in the kitchens, eat, telly, bed. It was alright, the girls were alright.

As the rain eased and the morning stretched into a cloudy promise of sun, a Let’s Feed Brum volunteer explained to another volunteer that the system of care for the homeless was broken. He folded his arms and looked straight ahead as he said more than 150 beds were axed at the beginning of winter. The closure of Washington Court and the Salvation Army had pushed people back onto the streets. The Council had to choose who to fund, he said, without looking into the eyes of the person listening. The more he had these conversations, the more he found it difficult to join the person in shock at the news. The information was solidifying in him like a cooling lava. The unmet needs pouring onto the streets felt hard and cold. It was forming a new landscape. His gaze was becoming sharper.

Down by the Bull, in front of Metro Bank, underneath the enormous digital advertising screen, a man played the trumpet. The sound hit the air like the light of dawn. The notes, striking the puddles and the glass, vibrating the eardrums of the birds and the people, were magical. They darted through doorways, fading into the hum of the heated shops.

The man was confident. He was curly haired and robust, and, as trumpet players do, held his trumpet high for the greatest notes. It was the first time that place, those buildings, those people, had ever felt that music and somewhere in his body he knew what he was bringing.

A woman carrying bags in both hands smiled at the sky as her body moved for a second like a wave to his notes before something took her and she dropped her head again.

When a vibration strikes a moment, nothing is ever the same. When her body moved, something has been remembered and woven into that place again. The seats in the Kärnthnerthor Theater exactly 200 years ago, changed the day the premier of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony took place. Vienna was never the same Vienna. The moment released a story and in that story were the attempts to conjure a vibration that was both felt and gone as soon as it was spoken about. Any tale of beauty is not the thing itself, but it is a powerful tale. Just as, by equal measure, the absence of beauty is felt and conjures the power of absence. Say Vienna, and you will remember things you never knew, loitering in the field of consciousness, reverberations of moments weaving stories to this day. Oh, Vienna, yes, go to Vienna, we say, with reverence, and we don’t know why. Speak to Gemma, for a moment, speak and look in her eyes, and watch her story weave its way around your mind.

The trumpet player had a card machine. He knew he was worth something, he knew his notes were not the steady promise of folk music, or the gentle offering from a timid soul. They were the learnt pathways from some of the greatest conjurers of our time on earth, and shortly after the rain, shortly after the queues had died down in Pigeon Park, shortly after most of the city had opened its doors and people had begun tapping and beeping their ways into breakfast and coffees, and new things, or uniforms and sign-ins and log-ons, shortly after all this had begun, he rose his trumpet to the sky and birthed a moment. There, at the confluence of New Street and High Street, in the shadow of the aging giant Waterstones, lit by the urgent blue and red of Metro Bank, across the street from the precisely magnificent cakes and pastries in the window of EL & N, his sounds renewed the air.

But not everyone has the chance to hear it, even if their eardrums vibrate, even if they walk, with six senses active in front of the player. We have been, many of us, trained to miss it. We are trapped in a constant cycle of escaping discomfort and finding relief. We are in the age of big, self-centred thrills. Big, like notifications all day, big, like new clothes whenever we need them at whatever price suits us, big, like the hit of caffeine, big sugar, big drugs, big cars, big sex, big identity, big labels and big wars and big accusations, big yoga, big breathing, big healing. We can heal in our bedrooms, we can heal in the Amazon. Choose.The more personalised the offer is to our discomfort, the more trained the sniper of relief on us, its target, the more we pay attention. Me. I am doing me, we say. I need this.

But we cannot remember, we cannot recognise beauty and not become aware of our addictions. There is so much space in beauty and its absence, there is so much room for all of us and anyone who will come that meeting it can be somewhat of a shock. Once we taste the power of the trumpet's note, our little moves become dead ends. Valuable in their necessity, but dead even so. At the end of the decaf soya cappuccino, like at the end of pint, there is the end of the thing.

Re-member, re-cognise, says the trumpet. Grace is impersonal, miraculous. No one earned the trumpeter's breath. He gave it to us because that is what he had to give. The trumpet, the trumpet is the instrument of announcements, wake up, wake up, it pulses through the air. Remember me.

There was nothing subtle in the trumpet player’s sound, urgent as the colours of Metro Bank, woven with the brilliance of a star. But hoards of people walked by and didn’t look up. As if the very thing that made them human was sleeping. The buildings, the birds, the pavements and the water of the puddles were filled with the music but it is us who are capable of listening to renewal. If we, the vehicles of the dream of beauty walk by, we are are missing our purpose on earth.

The trumpet moved us all, nonetheless, in some small way. Even if we were unaware. Something shifted, a sense of loss, a sadness, an annoyance, a lift, a memory of a grandparent, daughter, a friend gone to another place, a smile, a tear, the smell of someone’s body, what came to us, what came through the beauty?

Is it true that when we reject these things we feel pain? Is it true that our mind splits and we seek anything to distract us. Is it true that we are as scared of the light as we are of the dark?

If the mind has been taught (even a little bit) about how to look for miracles, it will hear the sound of the trumpet and the heart will come. Who or what beauty we might remember is in the roads we have taken, the beauty manifests personally. We have meaningful tales to weave. We must conjure the vibrations.

The trumpet player had a card machine. The trumpet player had a card machine because, even though he was classically trained, even though he had entered Young Musician of The Year when he was 16, even though he had studied and the Royal College of Music, and had a Masters in Performance in the Royal College of Scotland, he had to hustle to give his moments away and be paid accordingly in his industry. He had to hustle with his shirt done up, and his shoes shined. He had to hustle to give away moments that birth life and hope and joy, in a vibration we just have to connect to.

He said, as the song ended, he said to a woman who stopped to listen, that he had been tired, and he had been lost, that he had been confused, because he wanted to play and for people to listen. He said he had begun to play on the streets because it was the simplest way to make some money and do what he loved. He made more money in the first month he did it that in the previous three months as a paid musician. He has a need to play, and he has to do it somewhere people can listen, so they give him things in return. They are grateful, it is gratitude, he said.

In another part of the city an Uber driver passed a billboard that said ‘It’s the hope that keeps us here’ and wondered what it was advertising.

Inside St Phillip’s Cathedral in Pigeon Park school children sat on the cold tiles and heard the history of the building, the facts and details about the stained glass. Guides diligently told the stories as the light burned blue and red and white, washing over the children, reminding them of miracles, of their ability to truly see, of their own light.

A child will go home and, remembering the glow of the multicoloured light, tell a fact from the guide infused with awe, and their mother will make a sound of pleasant surprise, and run their hand around their little face and smile.

Phones beeped, the trumpet player played, the toothless woman opened her bag alone and ate her sandwich were no one could see her struggle. The buildings glistened in the rain as sounds disappeared into things and miracles became and became and were too, momentarily missed.

Daniel de Gruchy-Lambert