Life, Death, and All That Jazz

One nice spring day in May 2024, trumpeter/composer Ambrose Akinmusire and his band—a distinctive lineup of pianist Sam Harris, drummer Justin Brown, keyboard player Chiquitamagic, rapper-vocalist Kokayi, and the Mivos String Quartet—entered a Minneapolis studio to record a piece titled “s-/Kinfolks.” 

For nearly half an hour, the music folded and unfolded through swoops of seamless, revelatory transitions: scraping strings, trumpet that sounds like it’s talking, piano-centered pastorals, ambient synths spiked by space squawks, improvised free-styling, all leading to a near-chaotic peak that gives way to an elegiac coda. Some composed, some created on the spot, it’s an exhilarating mix of jazz, classical, hip-hop, and EDM/ambient touches, but existing in a place where those labels are rendered meaningless.

And now it’s the thrilling culmination of Akinmusire’s new album, honey from a winter stone, an astonishingly original set that itself is the culmination of various explorations the musician has made through the last 15 years.

How did he and the band prepare for this monumental session?

“Okay,” he says on a Zoom from the studio at his home in Berkeley, CA. “I told myself when I talked about this album I would be as honest as possible.”

He takes a breath.

“Okay, so the night before we were all hanging out at a club. And there was a drag show. We were all drinking. We came into the studio, we recorded a bunch of tracks. And there was a bar next door. And we went and had tequila shots before we did this song.”

Quickly he adds, “But that’s not why it’s 30 minutes long, I promise!”

He sputters a laugh.

The music is remarkable, its ambitions and achievements evoking such vaunted artists as Alice Coltrane, Wadada Leo Smith, and Wayne Shorter. But as the pre-game activities make clear, the spirits were unburdened and the feel was loose.

“That was another thing about this record,” says Akinmusire, who was born and raised in nearby Oakland. “There was no pressure. I paid for all of this upfront and I was willing to lose it all. So I think maybe that’s what you hear there. Just freedom.”

But there was also something heavier here, something that brought him a new sense of purpose and drive, something stronger than tequila shots coursing through the album: a near-death experience.

“We’ll just say I woke up and I was dead,” he says, not comfortable with sharing the details. “It’s a long, very complicated story, uh, that gets weird.”

Whatever it was, it gave him a jolt to his core.

“You know, I’m a father,” he says. “I’m 42. I have an 8-year-old son. I’m thinking a lot about legacy. When do I leave? What do I leave? How do I leave? So there’s a lot of that death, dealing with death. And I’m an only child. My mom had a stroke at the end of May. This was after we recorded all this stuff, but it was already on my mind, all this stuff, just death and legacy, how we live and all that.”

This is explicit in the album’s first piece, “muffled scream,” in which Kokayi raps a mix of text by Akinmusire and his own improvised free-style:

“Floating and I’m floating in these spaces … I’m like leaving no traces of who I was … But then one thought of my son / oh no / who gonna take care of my son”

The music, too, carries and illuminates those thoughts, those questions, those epiphanies in an emotional tapestry using all of the vast scope of experience and imagination that Akinmusire and his cohorts brought to the project. 

The near-death episode also opened up other avenues of thought regarding legacy and community.

“Another theme is mental health,” he says, citing specifically the album’s third of its five pieces, “MYanx.,” which he pronounces my angst.  “That song is from the perspective of a Black man who goes in to see a psychiatrist. And it is also critical of our medical industry. You know, it’s like, ‘Hey, whatever. Just take this pill. You’re okay. You’re crazy.’ And another main theme of the album is colorism. You know, who gets to speak for the Black community and why? And what do they say? Who’s awarded and what are they awarded? That’s something that sticks with me that I’ve been thinking about a lot.”

That latter is something he’s wrestled with throughout his work. “My Name is Oscar,” from 2011’s When the Heart Emerges Glistening, has a spoken tribute to a young Black man killed by Oakland transit police. “Rollcall for Those Absent” from 2014’s The Imagined Savior is Far Easier to Paint, and “Free, White and 21” on 2018’s Origami Harvest feature recited litanies of Blacks unjustly killed—Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and so many others — the first one spoken by a child. With “Hooded Procession (Read the Names Outloud)” from On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment in 2020, despite the song title, he moved beyond words into pure musical expression of anger and grief. On this album, he extends that approach on the instrumental “Bloomed (the ongoing processional of nighas in hoodies),”   

The writings of James Baldwin and the fiery Black consciousness jazz of Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln are among the things he cites as crucial influences. But from early in his life in Oakland, with its long history as a center of Black culture and fights for social justice, he was drawn to education and activism and, in particular, its place in jazz.

“The people that got me into jazz were ex-Black Panthers,” he says. 

A key moment for him was the 1997 release from prison of Panther figure Geronimo Pratt, after a 1972 murder conviction was vacated on appeal.

“When Geronimo Pratt was released from jail, I went with a bunch of jazz musicians, including [Oakland jazz leaders] Herbie Lewis and Donald “Duck” Bailey to the park to see Pratt give a speech. I come from that type of Oakland, before its most recent gentrification, where the community recognized that Oakland is spiritual ground, you know. And that’s actually the door that I came through to music. I think if there was any other door, I don’t know if it would have been as attractive to me.”

Music already had been a big part of his life. His mom, from small-town Mississippi, played blues and gospel records at home. 

“Every Sunday we listened to Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace records,” he says. “Every Sunday.”

Then on weekend stays with his dad, who was from Nigeria, he’d hear King Sunny Ade, Oumou Sangaré (with whom he later did a collaboration at the Monterey Jazz Festival), and Fela Kuti. And, of course, his friends were all into the soul and hip-hop thriving in Oakland.

“That was the soundtrack of Oakland,” he says. “I knew all the Too Short records. I knew all the MC Hammer records. My mom knew MC Hammer.”

The big break came when, after having started to play trumpet in middle school band, he saw a flyer for a summer jazz camp.  He’d met Lewis and Bailey, who were teaching at the camp, on his first day there. Saxophonist Joe Henderson, a local legend, also taught there.

Several years later, sax innovator Steve Coleman taught a visiting workshop at Akinmusire’s high school and was impressed enough with the youngster to take him on a European tour as part of his Five Elements band. After that, Akinmusire attended the Manhattan School of Music, got his master’s degree at USC, and studied at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in Los Angeles (now known as the Herbie Hancock Institute). 

In 2007 he won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition and made his first album, Prelude … to Cora, before moving back to New York where he worked with Esperanza Spalding, Vijay Iyer, Jason Moran, and others. Soon he was signed by Blue Note Records, with which he made five albums, before signing for this new one with venerable Nonesuch. Through it all he’s made many sideman appearances in concert and recordings, as well as continuing a passion for music education from the teaching side. He currently serves on the faculty of the Hancock Institute as well as teaching in a program in Basel, Switzerland.

In the course of his albums, he’s explored and evolved considerably. He’s always been a wizardly musician, with masterful skills. But the emotional content has been paramount for him and he’s seemed to be on a search for forms and settings that allow him to keep expanding that. The new one is his third album with a string quartet (second with Mivos) and second full ensemble with no bass. He’s worked regularly on his albums with rappers (Das Racists’ Kool A.D.) and singers (Becca Stevens, Theo Bleckmann). With honey it all comes together as a fully meshed whole, a free flow of ideas both in Akinmusire’s leadership and the ensembles’ creative teamwork.

There were some key inspirations from a wide spectrum that helped him shape his vision for this album.

“I was listening to a lot of Julius Eastman,” he says. “I was listening to a lot of Ravel, a lot of music from Mali, a lot of hip-hop.”

Eastman, in particular, had a huge impact. A Black, gay composer, pianist, singer, and conductor, Eastman was one of the first to experiment with what came to be known as minimalism in the early 1960s, with its repetition and shifting, shimmering textures. But he found recognition and opportunities scarce and after battling mental health and addiction issues died in obscurity at just age 49 in 1990. Recent years, though, have seen his music, now seen as prescient, revived and his achievements celebrated. Akinmusire says that this new album is in part homage to him.

“I used to be sort of obsessed with sustain, like the beginning of a note, the ending of a note, and what happens in the middle,” he says. “And from there I got into repetition through Steve Reich. And I started doing research and talking to people about it and started hearing this name, Julius Eastman, especially when I talked with African-American composers. They would say, ‘Steve Reich didn’t come up with that. There was a guy, Julius Eastman.’ I said, ‘Okay, cool.’”

Soon he investigated not just his music, but his life.

“I started thinking a lot about the conditions he had to create under and still didn’t get his due credit until now. All of those things. But specifically the repetition and also the lack of genre. You hear him, you hear his music, and you’re like, ‘I don’t know what genre this is.’ And I love that. Like it could be jazz, it could be classical, it could be whatever.” 

That “whatever” is carried in the violin pulse that runs through “Bloomed,” the most explicitly Eastman-esque piece on the album. But it’s also found in the various projects Akinmusire has taken on of late, including several film score commissions and, notably, his first ballet, Slow Burn, a collaboration with choreographer Aszure Barton, premiered by the Hamburg Ballet in December. 

The new album also follows two that are something of intimate side-trips from the full ensemble works for him: Beauty is Enough, a hauntingly spare set featuring only Akinmusire on his trumpet, and Owl Song, a dazzling trio album on which he was joined by two jazz giants. guitarist Bill Frisell and New Orleans drummer Herlin Riley.

While the format is quite different, there’s a continuity from the trio album in the winter stone piece “Owled,” with Kokayi taking the part of that bird in an existential free-style:

“How we gonna live / how we gonna find that one thing that make us free / swoop down from the sky,” Kokayi raps. “Trying to find my life / to stay alive.”

“Owl is my spirit animal,” Akinmusire says. “My association with owls is not anything new. I’m just starting to talk about it. They’re all around me. Like, I built this studio…”

He looks around the room.

“And a week later there was an owl in a tree outside, right here in Berkeley. I  grew up around here, I never saw an owl! But now there’s one here. I just really vibe with them.”

Flying all over, trying to balance life as an artist with that as a father, looking for new horizons personally and musically…

“It’s the owl thing, right?” he says. “I’m just kind of swooping around and you don’t know where I’m at. But I’m out there.”