EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT DUAL-USE BRASS INSTRUMENTS EMPLOYED BY COVERT GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

I’ve received more than a few tasteless death threats, not to mention a cease-and-desist letter warning me to keep my big mouth shut over the dual-use brass instruments that Zeke and Bobby were carrying when their mission to shadow Woody Herman (over his enormous load of back taxes) was scrubbed and they were diverted to apprehend Cramden Cooper, who was at that point, the second most wanted fugitive in the country, although, he hadn’t really done that much to deserve it, although he also hadn’t done that much not to deserve it, either.

At any rate, as much as I respect my nation’s desire to conceal sources and methods, I think we’ve reached the stage in our country’s history where the right of the citizen to know what is being done in his name outweighs the right of government right to do it with maximum secrecy.

….at least, if we are to continue as a Republic.

With that in mind, I would also like to point out that very little concerning said instruments revealed much more than what had already been publicly disclosed in a FOIA request that the government may, or may not, be aware that they responded to. And if the government doesn’t like it, maybe they should pay a little more attention to who they’re leaving in charge of the copy machines on the weekends. 

But since they’re so hot about it, I decided that perhaps I hadn’t been quite thorough enough in exposing the pretentious musical performances to which the government is willing to subject its citizenry under the false banner of keeping us all safe.  

That being said, here is what I have been able to dig up on this still rather murky chapter in American domestic orchestral espionage.

Introducing to a widespread audience for the first time, the Hag Stone 3000 Concert Trumpet, and its analogous line of brass instruments, including the Professional Cornet, and the more limited run of flugelhorns. There may be others. The instrument mentioned in the book, I believe to be a couple of duel-use trumpets, although my uncle’s notes show that Cooper referred to them as flugelhorns in at least one interview, although in others, he used the term cat horn.

The nomenclature is a bit of a riddle. The name Hag Stone was apparently assigned early on in development, and perhaps before the government scientists fully realized the ultimate use of their final creation, which seems quite contrary to the name, although it all may have been part of a misdirection program.

A hag stone, as everyone knows, refers to the magical amulets that sailors back around the 8^th Century sought for protection from the mythical sirens that would call to them to their death by singing about really inappropriate sexual favors that could be had from a seriously hot seabitch, no strings attached, if they would just plough their ship a little further into the fog and at a slightly more perpendicular angle than their nautical charts suggested was a safe passage along the rocky coasts of Capri or Galli.

In truth, these instruments seem more on the side of the old sirens than the sailors. No matter. The name stuck.

Moving back slightly from those early days of development, I will be considerate and leave many names and places out of this account, let’s just say that under J. Edgar Hoover, it became readily apparent by the mid-1960s, that most every big band leader that the nation had ever known was seriously delinquent on their federal income taxes, and had no intention to evening up.

In their own defense. Big Band Leaders were really bad with money. They were the victims of easy money. Their talents and charms took the nation by storm against very little competition, from the Great Depression right through the end of World War Two. By the time that advancements in technology and a burgeoning amongst other musical genres had left them with a thinning audience, they were well already well-accustomed to the three martini lunch, trashing the finest hotels, going through expensive women faster than saxophone reeds, and using the best whiskey that the country had ever produced as cologne, breath freshener and carpet cleaner. The bill had finally started coming due in the mid 1960’s, even though, they still had enough of a following to maintain the delusions of grandeur that just a few years earlier, had been solid truth.

That being said, the unstoppable force of their lifestyle habits had to eventually hit the immovable object of the 17^th amendment. If the nation’s population of aging band leaders could get away with not paying their income tax, others would certainly catch  on and want a piece of the action.

With that in mind, a huge effort was put into motion which dwarfed the resources mustered together to put a man on the moon, but instead, was directed towards surveilling the nation’s class of criminal band leaders to determine if they were sitting on a stockpile of wealth secretly fueling their pretentious lifestyles, which could be better spent making bombs to drop on Southeast Asia.  

The effort was manifold, but chief among the concerns was the ability of federal agents to infiltrate the tight social circles of the band leaders. Anyone with any hope of broaching this inner sanctum would have to carry superb musical talent, and yet, the government didn’t want to wait years while new agents completed their training at Julliard,  so a great deal of expertise was concentrated on this very perplexing issue.

One of the many solutions was to apply technology to the problem. Some of the agency’s foremost scientists and engineers tackled it head one right at the Laboratory Division at Quantico. While musical instruments were reverse engineered, pioneering musicians were abducted and forced to explain their very existence from an early age, up through their years in the spotlight, just so that the government could get a clear understanding of the musical mindset.

One of the great epiphanies of this great endeavor was the birth of the very dual-use instruments mentioned in the novel, The New Ride in Town, which so effectively exposed decades of undercover work and created havoc within the intelligence community.

For anyone still in the dark, these duel-use instruments were part standard brass instrument, part cassette player. An ingenious blend of the ordinary and the deceptive which was just the ticket to allow completely talentless federal employees to walk the enamored paths alongside those many times their musical superior. The functionality is elementary. An agent can play a standard 120-minute tape (pre-filled with the fine music of any concert set list) in a cassette player concealed among the valve stems, and yet, bring the instrument up to his own puckered lips and feign that the sound is coming from his own two lips.

With the evolution of that concept, the concert halls usually reserved for the small minority of supra-talented old world jazz musicians was forever flung wide open for any mid-grade government investigator to walk through. No band leader would ever again be able to live a life of privacy and comfort with little or no government involvement. The world was safe, at least until someone came along to blow the lid off the case, for federal bureaucracies to flourish.