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Posts tagged ‘Ambrose Akinmusire’

Mar 19

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A night at Wigmore Hall

The roots of the trumpet-and-piano duo in jazz go back to the day in December 1928 when Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines recorded a piece titled “Weather Bird”. It became a classic, one of the keystones of jazz history. I was thinking about it when Ambrose Akinmusire and Sullivan Fortner took the stage at the Wigmore Hall last night, so I was thrilled when it turned up in the first section of their 90-minute concert.

They began with variations on two Akinmusire compositions, “Grace” and “Weighted Corners”, before “Weather Bird” made its appearance on the way to “Stablemates”, Benny Golson’s hard-bop favourite. By that time, around 20 minutes in, it was obvious that we were being exposed to something special. The liquid clarity and endless enventiveness of Akinmusire’s trumpet had clearly found a perfect match in Fortner, who was born in New Orleans and displays all the elegance associated with the city’s great pianists as well as his own ability to create strong and deep currents which guide the music’s flow.

A rarely glimpsed peak was reached with the next section, which opened with a Fortner tune called “Aerobatics”, written specially for Akinmusire, leading into an investigation of something that revealed itself to be “All the Things You Are”. That’s a tune I’ve heard played hundreds of times by players of all kinds, including some of the greats, but never like this. It emerged in fragments, twisted and disordered (Fortner’s allusion to the familiar dark-hued intro from the various Charlie Parker versions came several minutes in), but recombined by the two musicians into a constantly shifting mosaic, completely new while somehow seeming to carry the weight of all previous versions. It was like hearing the tune in a hall of mirrors, each set at a different angle, throwing its shapes from different perspectives and trajectories.

The third section of the set was devoted to Akinmusire’s “Owl Song 1”, a ballad whose astonishing tenderness — beautifully enunciated in Fortner’s solo — provided a platform for the trumpeter’s occasional fondness for finding a quickfire motif and repeating it with elaborations and variations of tone until it exhausts itself and is absorbed by the prevailing tide. It’s an example of the sense of dramatic architecture that characterises his work, even at its least superficially emphatic.

For the encore, there was a return to Armstrong with a vigorous reinvention of “West End Blues”, recorded by the Hot Five six months before Louis and Hines got together. Akinmusire and Fortner were showing that musicians who belong to the 21st century can understand how to draw from the past to help create the future. What they did last night — blending joy, humour, lyricism, compassion — represented the highest refinement of the improviser’s art, creating something in the moment that will stay with you forever.

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.