Jazz trumpeter Akinmusire brings quartet to Bay Area
In a career marked by a succession of creative triumphs, Ambrose Akinmusire has just delivered his most concise and telling musical statement yet.
It might seem strange to describe the Oaklandreared trumpeter’s sprawling new double album, “A Rift in Decorum: Live at the Village Vanguard,” as concise. More than a display of imaginatively virtuosic improvisation, Akinmusire’s third Blue Note release distills the coiled power and emotional range of his working quartet with pianist Sam Harris, bassist Harish Raghavan and drummer Justin Brown.
Live recordings from the Vanguard have been consequential because they’ve captured the music’s greatest working ensembles — bands that have attained a preternatural level of communication, like the John Coltrane Quartet, the Bill Evans Trio, the George Adams and Don Pullen Quartet and a succession of Fred Hersch’s trios.
“The Vanguard is a place to highlight a band,” says Akinmusire, 35. All those great albums dealt with band chemistry, the spirit you can only get when you have a band, a group of people trying to reach this other thing.”
He performs a succession of gigs around the region with the quartet, including four sets at the SFJazz Center’s Joe Henderson Lab as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival (June 14-15). For the shows at Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society (June 18) and Kuumbwa Jazz Center (June 19), Jamire Williams (who has been in the studio recently with Herbie Hancock) takes over the drum chair from Brown.
Even before Akinmusire, a Berkeley High grad, won the 2007 Thelonious Monk International Trumpet Competition, he brought an unusual degree of poise and a finely calibrated sense of structure to the bandstand. He has grown into one of jazz’s most esteemed young composers with an array of prestigious commissions, including “The Forgotten Places” for the Monterey Jazz Festival and “banyan” at Chicago’s Hyde Park Jazz Festival.
Part of what makes “A Rift in Decorum” such a welcome addition is that many of the compositions weren’t conceived as grand statements. The tunes often explore a specific mood, texture or idea, unleashing the band to pull at a piece’s seams. The title suggests Akinmusire’s embrace of disruption, though he’s reluctant to assign any specific interpretation to the phrase.
“It could be a rift in my discography, a live album, maybe the only one I’ll ever do,” he says. “Or maybe a rift against the decorum of today.”
Providing his band with a steady stream of new material is a strategy that Akinmusire says he gleaned from a conversation with pianist Vijay Iyer (who’s in this area next week as the music director for Cal Performances Ojai at Berkeley festival). Bringing in a few new tunes on every tour “keeps things interesting,” he says. “I understand that rehearsal and performance are part of the compositional process. I never put a period on it and say I’m done. My job is to make it comfortable for people to add themselves to the piece.”
No one has played a bigger role in shaping the quartet’s sound than drummer Justin Brown. A couple of years younger than Akinmusire, he was living in Concord when he finagled his way into Berkeley High, drawn by the school’s vaunted jazz program. He made the highly competitive jazz ensemble as a freshman and forged a tight bond with the trumpeter.
When Akinmusire returned to New York in 2008 after graduating from the Thelonious Monk Institute’s Masters program in Los Angeles, he tapped Brown for his new band, and the drummer has played on all four of Akinmusire’s albums.
“It was just sort of natural that I started playing with him as his sideman,” says Brown.
“From there, the experience was about growing as brothers and musicians. Always expect the unexpected. Always keep that child mentality: Oh, check this out! What are you practicing? Let’s check somebody out.
“It’s been an onward and upward journey.”