In an interview, Kay spoke about her desire to make her story read like music, specifically echoing the structure of jazz music.[11] Critics have acclaimed her for accomplishing this in a powerful and intricate narrative without melodrama. In an article for the Boston Phoenix, David Valdes Greenwood wrote that "in the hands of a less graceful writer, Jackie Kay's Trumpet would have been a polemic about gender with a dollop of race thrown in for good measure. But Kay has taken the most tabloid topic possible and produced something at once more surprising and more subtle: a rumination on the nature of love and the endurance of a family".[12] Time magazine called it a "hypnotic story ... about the walls between what is known and what is secret. Spare, haunting, dreamlike", and the San Francisco Chronicle commented that "Kay's imaginative leaps in story and language will remind some readers of a masterful jazz solo".
Matt Richardson, in examining the novel's transgender subjectivity and use of a Jazz aesthetic, noted that "as a form that encourages the transformation of standard melodies into multiple improvised creations, jazz is useful in expanding our conceptualization of the potential for Black people to recreate ourselves and our gender identities in a diasporic practice".[13]
In his analysis, Richardson also notes the influences of African American culture on other Black populations, notably Black British people. He writes, "Kay is not the first British lesbian of African descent to adopt African American history and cultural aesthetics in her strategic representation of British queerness.”[13] Richardson writes specifically about the Black British filmmaker Inge Blackman's documentary "B.D. Women", which references a Harlem speakeasy during the 1920s and 1930s. The Blues are also a prominent feature in Blackman's documentary.[14] Richardson's analysis notes that both Kay's and Blackman's works were produced in the context of the African diaspora where race, gender, and sexuality inform their works.
