This may be a short book, but three enthralling stories are entwined in it. One involves the journey of a visionary modern jazz trumpeter who missed becoming a legend through happenstance, nostalgia for home, racism, and his own roving curiosity. A second vividly describes the eloquence of a rebelliously creative poet who heard the vernacular speech of his birthplace and improvisation in jazz as very similar languages; the third tracks the dreams of a reluctant but idealistic politician whose hopes for steering a cultural change evaporated in government faction-fights on his return to his homeland on the island of St Vincent.