Jazzwise: "I Can Take Solos That are Clean and Pristine But What Happens After That?

Coming to prominence while a just teenager, and still only in his 30s, American jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire has already won a lifetime’s worth of awards and accolades. With the release of a superb new Blue Note album On The Tender Spot Of Every Calloused Moment – a powerful expression of the contemporary black experience – his profile is surely set to soar still higher. Kevin Le Gendre talks to this most literary of musicians about his love of language and desire to pause and reflect in the heat of the moment.

There is no definitive rulebook on how to title a song. Vast differences in vocabulary and personality can be seen from one artist to the next. Ambrose Akinmusire has a distinct literary flourish, paying as much attention to his choice of words as he does notes and tones on the albums he has recorded in the past decade. As The Heart Emerges Glistening, The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier To Paint, A Rift In Decorum and Origami Harvest were all named after long gestations. The births needed thought.

“Usually I brainstorm… it could be maybe 100 titles I’ll come up with, then I’ll keep whittling them down, chopping them up until I get one title that has the essence of all the 100 titles,” he explains on a clear line from Oakland, California. “Yes, I am very much interested in language, including its limitations. But I think I’m mostly interested in the gesture of words, how they hint, how they can go forward, but also be hinting at something to the left. And that’s how I come up with these titles.”

Akinmusire’s engagement with all things written is extensive, and off the top of his head he cites a current reading list which is eclectic: doyenne of African-American activism Angela Davis; beat generation enfant terrible William Burroughs; Afro-Futurist Grande Dame Octavia Butler and Morgan Parker, whose poetry collections Magical Negro and There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé offer the kind of intellectual electricity that would appeal to minds that are anything but switched off.