Michael Karnjanaprakorn

“Men (and women) wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”

We’re smallish (25 people), in New Orleans, and feeling very Ernest Shackleton these days.

Trumpet is sitting in the middle of arguably the most daunting and exhilarating social laboratory of our time.

Most of our clients are engaged neck-deep in the pivotal areas of the recovery and the re-visioning of the City. So are we. Farther upstream in their business than we ever imagined. Finding out that’s where the real transformative stuff lives.

It’s damn near overwhelming. And communications – authentic, interactive, deep/wide, inspired, soul-revealing, and culturally influential communications – will have a big say in the outcome.

So we did what any self-respecting shop (we now call ourselves a brand studio) would do – lost our mind, resigning our largest client (but frustratingly unambitious – man it’s hard to sling burrito FSIs when your city’s drowning) in L.A. To throw our full weight behind the cultural, economic and political transformation of our decidedly quirky little big town. “America’s Soul Kitchen” Wynton calls it.

So far so good. The intensity is at 11. Foxhole culture. Bigger emotion; high and low. Creative. Alive and open to what’s next.

And we’ve grown – a lot. Many new people since what Pulitzer-prize finalist and community conscience Chris Rose calls “The Thing”. It is, quite simply, the professional and personal work of a lifetime.

We’re trying to find the true believers who will fill six key positions at our agency. World-class and uncompromising types worthy of a Polar expedition.

We’re not merely seeking a warm body and maybe that’s the problem. There’s been considerable curiosity – but we need the full hat trick: A-level talent and ambition. The people we want will have mothers, friends and significant others (and us) question their sanity. As Anderson Cooper may have mentioned at some time or another, New Orleans is a challenging place to live these days.

And equally fascinating. Still creative, bohemian and stimulating. Still a place “freer than the rest of the country where elegance met an indefinable wildness to encourage the flowering of creative intelligence” (Wynton again).

But also heartbreaking, infuriating, touched with uncertainty, often exhausting, punctuated with random and profound acts of inventive defiance, lousy with authors, filmmakers, real estate speculators, network anchors, vultures, political sycophants, big-hearted church groups, and crawling with world-class think tanks, professional associations and foundations, all training their big brains on us.

This is the dawning of the next New Orleans. Maybe the next American city. Intolerance and engagement is high and parochialism is on the ropes creating what my good friend, the nationally-famous, locally-based architect and planner Allen Eskew and refers to as the combination of native intelligence and national expertise with global consequences. At the foundation, our culture. A culture that at its core – evidenced in the jazz funeral’s transition from somber dirge to raucous second line – is about how being finished is just another place you start from. For New Orleans, the future will not look like the past and quite frankly, that is terrifying. Exhilarating.

So if you know any valiant masochists with a good book, send them our way.