NPR: Ambrose Akinmusire's New Album Is A Circle In Time, Right Back To His First Jazz Show

The artist Ambrose Akinmusire will release on the tender spot of every calloused moment on Blue Note this June 5

By Nate Chinen

Ambrose Akinmusire was in the eighth grade, a budding trumpeter in Oakland, Calif., when he made his first excursion to a jazz club. Through a radio contest, he'd won tickets to the local mainstay, Yoshi's, unaware of the creative portal he was opening.

"The show happened to be The Art Ensemble of Chicago," says Akinmusire, referring to that singular force, and the farthest thing from a conventional jazz group. "These cats came out with their full makeup on, wearing these costumes. They faced east for like five minutes. So that was my first jazz show. My mom and I were sitting in the front row."

Now, a quarter-century later, Akinmusire is one of the most acclaimed jazz artists of his generation, a trumpeter of deep expressive resources and a composer of kaleidoscopic vision. Because he's on the mainstream roster of Blue Note Records, with a band that uses the post-bop language as a springboard, he isn't often placed in the same avant-garde continuum as The Art Ensemble. But Akinmusire makes that connection himself with "Mr. Roscoe (consider the simultaneous)," the first track we can hear from his sixth album, on the tender spot of every calloused moment, scheduled for release June 5.

The "Mr. Roscoe" in the title alludes to the venturesome multireedist and composer Roscoe Mitchell, founder and steward of The Art Ensemble and a 2020 NEA Jazz Master. Akinmusire first met him two years ago, when Mitchell was still the Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition at Mills College in Oakland. They convened at Mitchell's house, improvising as a duo and then playing through some of Mitchell's music. (They later performed a quartet concert at The Lab in San Francisco.)

Akinmusire — speaking from his home in Oakland, where he returned in 2016 after three years in Los Angeles and a decade in New York — tells NPR Music that he was humbled to witness Mitchell's dauntless commitment to discovery. "It was an amazing experience to see someone at that level, and an older musician, still searching," he says. "So that tune is based off some of the initial conversations that we had on that day that I met him."