The 41-year-old California trumpeter and composer Ambrose Akinmusire (pronounced “ah-kin-MOO-sir-ee”) is a generational talent, a consummate and multifaceted musician who came to the fore in the late 2000s and who has continued to improve and impress exponentially ever since.
He has led stellar groups featuring some of his prodigious peers – the pianist Gerald Clayton, the saxophonist Walter Smith III and the drummer Justin Brown, to name just three – and written ambitious and adventurous music that combines jazz and free improvisation with hip hop, spoken word and chamber music. In June he released a compelling solo trumpet album, recorded in a reverberant Gothic church in Paris. A rigorous and thoughtful musician, Akinmusire has also shown an admirable commitment to exploring the complexities of being black in the United States.
On Owl Song, his debut for Nonesuch following five well-received albums with Blue Note, the trumpeter pares things back to an agile if uncommon trio with two elder masters of the music: the guitarist Bill Frisell and the drummer Herlin Riley. “This is my reaction to being assaulted by information,” Akinmusire has said. “Part of the challenge was: can I create something that’s oriented around open space?”
The answer is a categorical “Yes, he can.” From the first notes of the opening title track you know you are in a place of great beauty, haunting melody, heightened sensitivity and enormous respect for the idea that, as Debussy declared, “Music is the silence between the notes.”
As with the best poems and short stories, this triumvirate do so much with seemingly so little. It requires enormous courage, skill and experience to make music work at such a bare-boned intensity; it’s almost as if they are trying to remove all excess and ornamentation in order to discover an essence, a truth, trusting that the charged spaces around them will conjure up a vital additional force. Sound familiar? Beckett is standing in the shadows somewhere nearby, whether they know it or not.
Frisell’s melodic imagination, harmonic richness and expansive colours, on both electric and acoustic guitar, are justly celebrated, yet Akinmusire’s magisterial poise, control and fluidity, and his limpid and tender tone, are equal revelations. Riley swings, though mostly with a rare delicacy and restraint; less really can be more.
This is the first of three records Akinmusire plans to release on Nonesuch over the next year, “each spotlighting a distinct element of his musical world and involving different instrumentation and production approaches”. If the next two are anywhere near as remarkable as Owl Song, we are in for a treat. This is one of the jazz albums of the year. Give it as a Christmas present to yourself.
