Trumpeter, Jacques Coursil's Trails of Tears is quite simply, a monumental undertaking and a major work that ought to bring to light some of the earlier work that comments on colonialism in America, such as the equally important Gorée (Schemp, 1984), from Beaver Harris/Don Pullen 360? Experience; that composition itself being a strident dirge about the history of slavery in the western-most point of Africa, which was, at one time the centre of the slave trade. It was from Gorée that white colonialists bought Africans as slaves, transporting them from this point in West Africa to South America, notably Brazil as well as to the Caribbean, and also to what is now the continental US. Why is this preamble so important to Trails of Tears?

Well, for one, this album is a moving lament, a dirge that mirrors one of the worst displacements of Native American people, hauntingly similar to the displacement of the African Diaspora. Only this music describes the lament of a people—the Cherokee, who were forced to leave their traditional homelands in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee between 1830 and 1839, a slap in the face of one of the most civilized, loyal Native Americans delivered from the so called colonial government. The history of this heartbreaking migration comes vividly alive in the remarkable and dramatic lamentation in seven parts. This is Coursil's musical Way of the Cross, one that unfolds like a sharp angular liturgy that is sure to become part of the literature of the trumpet, something that has not been added to music since