Ambrose Akinmusire doesn’t come across like an extremist. In conversation, he’s soft-spoken, earnest and thoughtful. But as a bandleader and composer, the Oakland-reared trumpeter is known for pushing past jazz’s conventions, creating music that hews to its own logic.
Last year, he seemed eager to shed everything extraneous, releasing an album featuring a solo trumpet recital, “Beauty is Enough,” and “Owl Song,” an alluring, capaciously spacious trio project with guitar great Bill Frisell and New Orleans drum poet Herlin Riley.
Now, after stripping his music down to the barest minimum, he’s back to building intricate multi-part soundscapes, presenting the West Coast premiere of “Honey From A Winter’s Stone” this Saturday, Aug. 24, as part of the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival.
A dense mélange of hip-hop, chamber jazz and new music, “Honey From A Winter’s Stone” features New York’s Mivos String Quartet, D.C.-based rapper/producer/singer Kokayi, and longtime Akinmusire collaborators Sam Harris on piano and keyboards, Mike Aaberg on synth, bass and keyboards, and fellow Berkeley High alum Justin Brown on drums. In many ways, the piece ventures further into territory Akinmusire explored on 2018’s “Origami Harvest,” which also featured Mivos, Aaberg, and Harris (with Das Racist rapper Kool A.D. contributing vocals).
Does he consciously toggle between bare-bones settings and intricately constructed combos? “Not consciously, but I can definitely see that’s what’s going on,” said Akinmusire, 42, in a recent conversation from his home in Berkeley. “It’s the way things come out of me. I don’t have middles. You see it with ‘Owl Song,’ really questioning the role of the middle. I’m a person of extremes, all or nothing, and I see the beauty of both.”
‘Smashing things together’
Beauty is a word that comes up often in conversation with Akinmusire. He’s one year into his appointment as artistic director of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance at the University of California, Los Angeles, an elite master’s program that he graduated from in 2007 (when it was known as the Thelonious Monk Institute and located at the University of Southern California). And, while the musician possesses a gleaming tone, he’s not talking about smooth cadences and pastel melodies. Akinmusire can play with unabashed lyricism, but he finds and creates beauty via contrast and tension, musical friction generated by pivoting dynamics, timbral juxtapositions, and the cagey use of silence.
He sees his art as a living process, a call-and-response practice based on “smashing things together and listening to the conversation they have,” he said. “Beauty and human empathy must be the core. I’m interested in how things can work together when they’re opposites, like how the Herlin Riley and Frisell thing works in ‘Owl Song.’”
With its spacious vistas, “Owl Song” is a forum for free-range improvisation amidst wide-open sketches. “Honey From A Winter’s Stone” is almost entirely composed, though when the ensemble recorded the music last year Akinmusire designed the sessions to ensure detours and unanticipated developments.
“I love to give them the music at the last minute, to keep it raw and keep the element of improvisation,” he said. “How do you deal with imperfection? There are moments when something happens and it turns into a ‘Bitches Brew’ situation for 10 minutes. I didn’t edit any of that out.”
He’s still editing and mixing the music for fall release on Nonesuch, and notes that withholding the score until the last minute only works because after the release of “Origami Harvest,” the musicians performed widely “and we did became a band and a family. That allows for moments like that to happen.”
Preparing “Honey From A Winter’s Stone” for release is hardly the only project on his plate. He’s also deep into mixing a new trio chamber jazz session with New Orleans pianist Sullivan Fortner and drummer/composer Tyshawn Sorey. But before that’s done, he has to complete a 60-minute score for the Hamburg Ballet, a collaboration with choreographer Aszure Barton.
He and Barton are also working on a new piece that will premiere in the spring as part of Juilliard’s 2024-25 season featuring his quartet performing the live score. “I’m also revamping my quartet, writing a whole new book for that band,” he said.
An East Bay star from the start
While his productivity is striking, anyone who’s watched Akinmusire since he was a teenager isn’t surprised by his ascendance. He started out immersing himself in jazz through a program at Oakland’s Alice Arts Center run by saxophonist Jessica Jones, a Berkeley High graduate.
Later, he connected with a cadre of brilliant young players like guitarist Julian Lage and pianist Taylor Eigsti at the Stanford Jazz Workshop. Trumpeter Khalil Shaheed provided playing opportunities at the Oaktown Jazz Workshop, and bandleaders Howard Wiley and Marcus Shelby started hiring the teenage trumpeter for gigs.
A standout player in the Berkeley High Jazz Band as a senior, Akinmusire displayed preternatural poise on the bandstand, soloing with precision and control. When the influential alto saxophonist and conceptualist Steve Coleman set up an Oakland residency for himself in 2001, Akinmusire and fellow Berkeley High trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson found their way into his orbit, which led to a European tour and the three-disc live album “Resistance Is Futile.”
“That was so influential,” Akinmusire said. “It was the first tour I did, and I see a musician who didn’t drink or smoke, lived a healthy lifestyle. It wasn’t necessarily the music, but the conversations, and seeing how dedicated he was. He treated me like he was an equal. He asked me this one question: ‘What’s your concept?’ I’m only 19, I don’t know. He said, ‘You’re old enough. Do you even know what concept means?’ No. ‘What do you want to sound like in five years, 10 years?’”
A full scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music put Akinmusire in the thick of the New York scene, where he thrived. After four years, another scholarship brought him back to the West Coast, where he earned an MA at the Thelonious Monk Institute’s elite program, run by trumpeter Terence Blanchard. He concluded that two-year stint by winning the 20th Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Competition in 2007, impressing a panel of trumpet royalty including Clark Terry, Roy Hargrove and Hugh Masekela.
By that time, he knew that guiding younger musicians was a central part of his calling. “I love teaching,” he told me in an interview not long after winning the Monk Competition. “That’s ultimately what I’m going to end up doing. I just want to teach students past the stage of knowing what they want to do.”
That’s where he lives with his music: a realm that’s deeply considered and often intricately mapped, but rife with unforeseeable vistas.
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Ambrose Akinmusire performs from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 24 as part of the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival in San Francisco. Free; more details here.
Beautiful!