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Posts tagged ‘Ambrose Akinmusire’

Apr 4

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All this beauty

So much wrong in the world, and yet so much wonderful new music. How to explain the existence, amid the trauma and violence and chaos agents and the encroachment of threat, of all this beauty? Here are five new albums I wouldn’t want to be without: Billy Hart’s Just (ECM), Yazz Ahmed’s A Paradise in the Hold (Night Time Stories), Nels Cline’s Consentrik Quartet (Blue Note), Vilhelm Bromander’s Jorden vi ärvde (Thanatosis), and — most of all — Ambrose Akinmusire’s Honey From a Winter Stone (Nonesuch). Each of them offers jazz pushing the edge of its current possibilities, moving forward as it has always done, drawing influences from wherever it sees potential, respecting the past, suggesting futures.

Hart’s album is full of beautifully balanced and flexible interplay between four masters: the drummer with Ethan Iverson (piano), Ben Street (bass) and Mark Turner (tenor saxophone). Ahmed explores her Bahraini heritage in lustrous tunes with the help of singers including Natacha Atlas and Brigitte Beraha. Cline’s quartet, completed by the saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, the bassist Chris Lightcap and the drummer Tom Rainey, explores the guitarist’s bracing and multi-faceted compositions which, while offering nothing specifically unfamiliar, create an original and constantly stimulating sound-world. Bromander’s Unfolding Orchestra, featuring the fantastic bass clarinetist Christer Bothén, extends the vision of Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra with great success.

But for some time now Ambrose Akinmusire has moving towards a music that sounds completely new, finding ways of incorporating elements of hip-hop and contemporary classical music into his compositions. It could be gruesome. Instead, with Honey From a Winter Stone, it’s a quiet revelation.

Has anyone yet used the term Fourth Stream to describe such music? If not, its time might have come. Akinmusire takes the post-Bartókian astringency of the Mivos Quartet and brings to it an improvising musician’s fluency. He draws in a rapper, Kokayi, whose words, tone and rhythms make a flow lucid and persuasive enough to convert any sceptic. And weaving in and out is his own trumpet work, representing in its liquid grace and constant unpredictability a kind of celestial marriage of Booker Little and Don Cherry, supported by two familiar accomplices, the pianist Sam Harris and the drummer Justin Brown, plus the synthesiser and vocals of Chiquitamagic.

Akinmusire has found a way to make all this work, to create from it a coherent and entirely contemporary statement. The longest track, the 29-minute s-/Kinfolks, cycles through various dimensions, from an exploratory opening trumpet flight of sumptuous inventivness through deep grooves, a dramatic change of temperature as Kokayi freestyles, and a passage for the strings that sounds effortless but strikes deep.

As I listened, I found myself thinking back to 1969 and the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s People in Sorrow. What s-/Kinfolks shares with that epic from half a century ago is a combination of rarified beauty, emotional heft (its elegantly understated play of mourning and defiance), and relevance to the present condition. Probably the album of the year already, with the others not far behind.

Jun 10

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Measuring the heart

ambrose-akinmusire

The great figures of jazz are the people who, as the decades pass, you can set your compass by. For me, in my generation, that meant Miles, Coltrane, Ornette. It’s always tempting to think that they don’t make people like that any more, but it’s not true. And I’m thinking that the trumpeter, composer and bandleader Ambrose Akinmusire might be one of them.

Akinmusire’s music has a moral heft that makes it a good place to turn to in times like these. Not many artists can so successfully maintain a commitment to beauty while bringing  intellect and rigour to bear on the issues of the day, never letting us forget what got him (and us) here: the history of African Americans.

In 2014, on The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint, the second of his five Blue Note albums, Akinmusire included a piece called “Rollcall for Those Absent”, in which a small child recites the names of black victims of police homicide, including Amadou Diallo and Trayvon Martin. It still rings in my head every time a new atrocity occurs. Throughout that and his other albums, even when there is no explicit text, a sense of mourning is mixed with the celebration.

On his new one, called On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment, that underlying emotion is redoubled. Even when this music is at its most complex, rippling and sparkling with detail, it moves on an undertow of the blues. The album begins with Akinmusire’s beautifully pure natural trumpet sound, all alone, introducing a track called “Tide of Hyacinth” which moves through dazzling interplay with the members of his regular quartet — Sam Harris (piano), Harish Raghavan (bass) and Justin Brown (drums) — and incorporates a recitation in Yoruba by the Cuban-born singer and percussionist Jesús Díaz. That’s a taste of the various approaches explored here, which range from a lovely little song pairing the voice of Genevieve Artadi (the singer with the LA electro-funk duo Knower) with Akinmusire’s Fender Rhodes piano, through the Monkish angularity of “Mr Roscoe” and the tender balladry of “Reset (Quiet Victories & Celebrated Defeats)” to a sombre, hymn-like dedication to the late Roy Hargrove, whose work with D’Angelo and others paved the way for Akinmusire’s appearance on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.

One track, only half a minute long, is for unaccompanied trumpet, the squeezed half-valve sounds reminiscent of Rex Stewart. Akinmusire goes that far back, and all the way forward. I don’t know of a trumpeter from the generations after Don Cherry who uses vocalised effects so brilliantly. He does it again on the penultimate track, “Blues (We Measure the Heart With a Fist)”, where the notes are compressed so tightly that they can barely escape over Harris’s damped notes before the mood switches into a passage of fantastic trumpet/bass/drums improvisation that seems to explore a new way of swinging.

The album ends with the ringing, carefully-spaced chords of the Fender Rhodes, bringing the album to a close with a short piece titled “Hooded Procession (Read the Names Aloud)”, the latest in Akinmusire’s series of threnodies for the victims of police violence. The timeliness of this does not require emphasis. Once again, he has created a soundtrack for our time that will live long beyond its moment.

* On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment is released on the Blue Note label.