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Jacques Coursil
Clameurs (Sunnyside) and
Trails of Tears (Universal)
“WHAT Coursil rips from his instrument by dint of unpremeditated stubbornness is the very thing to which the first trumpeters laid claim: the broken breathing of subterranean knowledge.”
So wrote the Martinican novelist and poet Edouard Glissant of Jacques Coursil, born in Montmartre, Paris, of Martinican parents in 1938.
In 1965 he travelled with his horn to New York, played in the progressive jazz loft scene with free spirits like Sunny Murray and Perry Robinson and pursued studies in linguistics and literature.
Returning to France, he taught at universities in Normandy and Martinique, before gaining a post back in the US at Cornell University.
While there he spent time living and learning with the Sioux in South Dakota and was present at the founding of the American Indian Movement. All these experiences were firmly lodged in the resistant brass of his horn.
In 2007 they came bursting out in his album Clameurs, recorded in Fort-de-France, Martinique, in the studio of Jeff Baillard, who produced and arranged the album.
“Four oratories for trumpet and voice” is how the music is described, with tracks named after the poet Monchoachi, Coursil’s revolutionary compatriot Frantz Fanon, the black pre-Islamic slave poet Antar (525-616AD) and the aforementioned Glissant.
All through, Coursil plays alongside voices, drums, synthesiser and bass with his sometimes numerous and soft-focused, other times crystalline and burnished notes, as if his horn were another griot’s creole voice.
In La Chanson d’Antar the beautiful, lyrical stammering of his phrases are unlike any sound I have heard a trumpeter create. In Frantz Fanon 1952 his languorous tone and sometimes wailing words, juxtaposing the wretched and the free, course from his heartsblood.
In 2007-9 Coursil returned to three separate locations and studios — New Jersey (2007), Montreuil in France (2008) and Fort-de-France (2009) — to record the album Trails of Tears.
In New Jersey he was reunited with his old confreres and pioneering free veterans Murray and Robinson, plus bassist Alan Silva, pianist Bobby Few and saxophonist Mark Whitecage.
In an album of historical and sonic power, Coursil unifies three struggles: those of Africa, the Caribbean and the endless resistance of Native American peoples which the trumpeter knew so well.
His theme revolves around the eviction of the Cherokee people from their ancestral lands in the 1830s and the appropriation of their territories by white farmers and gold prospectors, largely as a result of the 1830 Indian Removal Act.
Coursil writes in the album notes: “The snows and the deaths in thousands of the Cherokees leave a trail of tears answered by the peoples of Africa who were cast into the sea, their feet in chains, down into the ‘depths turned green’ (Glissant) which trace the Middle Passage at the bottom of the ocean.”
The Cherokees called their route to exile Nunna Daul Sunyi (the trail where we wept), the name of the album’s opening track.
Alex Bernard’s bass, Jose Zebina’s drums and Baillard on keyboards trace an inconsolable soundscape to Coursil’s weeping horn. People and places uprooted and lost forever: in Tennessee and Georgia, in Palestine or Western Sahara, the colonial scourge finds the cry of its sufferers in Coursil’s notes.
In The Removal (Act I), Robinson, Silva, Whitecage and Murray enter. Robinson’s squeals, Silva’s bowed agony, Murray’s percussive suddenness and Few’s wounded chords all tell the story as if sound were a greater chronicler than words.
The final two tracks — Goree and The Middle Passage — are, in Coursil’s words, “the African response to the exodus of the Indians.”
In Goree, the Senegalese island slaveholding fortress inspires deep, deep earthen bass sounds from Bernard and a quivering coda from Coursil.
And in the latter there is a strange and contradictory sense of optimism about Coursil’s lucid notes, as if all oppression somehow is also a signal of struggle, beauty and freedom — for all three are in the very essence of his sound.
