Jazz star Ambrose Akinmusire on Wayne Shorter, quitting Blue Note Records and finding beauty in troubled times
- The acclaimed trumpeter explains why he left the world’s biggest jazz label – and shares his fears for the coming US election
- An Oakland gangster first introduced Akinmusire to Wynton Marsalis’s music, while Roy Hargrove and Steve Coleman became early mentors to his meteoric rise
Last June, Ambrose Akinmusire announced his musical rebirth to the world with Beauty is Enough, a studio album promoted with a cryptic Joan Didion quote: “Maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?”
Whatever it was, the American trumpeter has certainly made much of the hand he’s been dealt over his two-decade-plus music career, all the while refusing to hew too close to convention.
“You know, I don’t play the game,” says Akinmusire, ahead of his recent Hong Kong debut at the Xiqu Centre, in West Kowloon. “Anything I’ve done, is because I was called to do it or it just came to me musically. I’ve never created music to be popular. I have never made any decision to further my career.”
Completely improvised, recorded in a single four-hour session at Paris’ Church of Saint-Eustache and released on Akinmusire’s own label, Origami Harvest, Beauty is Enough offers a fragile tonic, meant “to combat all the anxiety that we all feel from technology”.
Bold, also, because this Parisian palate cleanser punctuated his departure from Blue Note Records, the 85-year-old jazz behemoth, and signing to a more eclectic, boutique-y label.
And why? “Freedom,” says Akinmusire.
