The New York Times: Ambrose Akinmusire Learned to Let Go (With Help From Joni Mitchell)

Ambrose Akinmusire began to see a future for himself that might exist both in and outside of jazz while spending time with Joni Mitchell. Credit: Balazs Gardi for The New York Times

The trumpeter will release “Owl Song,” a spare new album, this fall as he takes on a new role as artistic director of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz.

By Giovanni Russonello

Sept. 10, 2023

For arguably the most technically gifted trumpeter of his generation, a lot of Ambrose Akinmusire’s breakthroughs actually come from letting go of standards and structures.

Take the moment about 10 years ago when, shortly after becoming friends with his lifelong creative idol, Joni Mitchell, Akinmusire found himself in a bathroom at her Los Angeles home, playing into a microphone. She’d suggested that he record trumpet for a new version of her song “Borderline,” and he was struggling to find a part that fit.

“I wasn’t getting it right. And she was like, ‘I know what you need: You need an egg shaker,’” he said recently in a video interview, still a touch amazed to be telling this story. Mitchell started rattling the shakers wildly, way outside the time signature. His hopes darkened. “But I played the track with her doing that, and for some reason it locked it in for me,” Akinmusire said. Suddenly, “I was able to play.”

And there was the time, just after the pandemic began, when Akinmusire decided to finally take the advice of Bennie Maupin — a multi-instrumentalist best known for his work with Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock — who had once told him to try improvising with only a drummer. “You can get to some new stuff if you just set up with a drummer and practice,” Maupin had told him. So in 2020, when life slowed to a standstill, Akinmusire started getting together with the young drummer Timothy Angulo at a grocery store parking lot near where he lived in Oakland, Calif. Five or six days a week for over a year, they would set a timer and improvise freely for a solid hour.