- This event has passed.
Ambrose Akinmusire
September 17, 2022 @ 8:00 pm
The Vermont Jazz Center is pleased to present on September 17th, 2022 at 8:00 PM, the Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet featuring Mr. Akinmusire on trumpet along with Sam Harris on piano and Tim Angulo on drums (bassist TBA). This is a live, in-person concert with no live streaming. Because Ambrose Akinmusire lives in California and seldom tours, this concert will be a special and rare event. The musicianship will be stellar and the quality of the experience will be sublime. This concert will be a very special, limited experience.
Akinmusire’s most recent album, his fifth for Blue Note Records, On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment, has been nominated as Best Jazz Instrumental Album for the 2021 Grammy Awards. He is a truth-teller whose music is an expression of his personal journey as a Black man. Although he loves playing jazz standards, he has chosen to compose original music that draws attention to the causes he feels strongly about, especially the realities of racism. He explained: “It’s important to me to talk about the injustices that Black people experience, and the fear that I have walking around the United States and really a lot of places in the world. In my music I am trying to express the beauty and the pain at the same time, trying to express what is to me the most defining part: resilience.”
Strong convictions define each of Akinmusire’s albums as a leader. His compositions and arrangements aren’t easy listening, but they are so well-balanced that the struggles and anxiety that do emerge are part of a bigger picture that is quelled by a universal equilibrium balanced by long stretches of sensitive playing and empathetic reflection. His sound on the trumpet is unlike anyone else’s. Akinmusire masterfully bends notes up and down to make his horn sound like the melismas of a human voice.
Akinmusire sees Black music as a continuum. He sees himself as a “channel” for its expression. One of his most striking (and perhaps controversial) realizations is that he views hip hop music as the natural evolution of Black music. In a conversation with jazz blogger, Phil Freeman, he gets into it: “So for me hip hop is jazz… I can hear Louis Armstrong in Kendrick Lamar, I really can. It’s kind of like what I was saying about Art Blakey and gospel. Black music at the end of the day is Black music. And I would argue that I make Black music, and therefore I make jazz, and therefore I make gospel – and it’s all part of the same tree. You can’t rip a branch off of the same tree and plant it, and convince everybody that what grows is a different tree, Black music is Black music.”
Setting up this concert has been years in the making, but it will be worth the wait. Come experience Ambrose Akinmusire, a legendary trumpet artist, a living legend who speaks for his generation as a respected leader and spokesperson.
—Downbeat Magazine
