Certainly the name Ambrose Akinmusire might not ring a bell at the home front (Nigeria); reason, he probably hasn't been to Nigeria all his life!
Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire's first brush with music was the piano at age
3. In his teens, the Oakland, California native showed great promise, playing
with the Berkeley High School Jazz Ensemble and collaborating with such jazz
luminaries as Joe Henderson, Joshua Redman, Steve Coleman and Billy Higgins,
all this before turning 18. A Manhattan School of Music and University of
Southern California graduate, Akinmusire studied with the likes of Vincent
Pinzerella, Lew Soloff, Terence Blanchard and Laurie Frink. He started on a
solo path with 2008's Prelude to a Cora. When the Heart EmergesGlistening came out on Blue Note in 2011, followed by The ImaginedSavior Is Far Easier to Paint three years later.
The young horn man, born on May Day, doesn’t stake that claim in the usual
way: by playing faster, harder and/or weirder than the competition. Akinmusire has
vertiginous glissandos and that glowing French-horn-like tone, usually submerging
his technique in a greater goal: creating powerful moods, then shattering them
and then replacing them with different colors until an emotional narrative
emerges.
Akinmusire, born to a Nigerian father also named Ambrose and mother, Cora from Mississippi grew up spending most days in North Oakland with his single mom, Cora, and, on the weekends, visiting his divorced dad. He played piano from the age of 4 in East Oakland’s First Truth Missionary Baptist Church, and grew up listening to his mother’s Aretha Franklin records, his father’s King Sunny Adé records and his own Snoop Dogg records. He fell in love with jazz when he attended a summer camp for middle schoolers run by local musicians. “It didn’t seem like such a big leap from hip-hop to jazz,” he insists. “Both put more emphasis on rhythm than pop music does. Both believe in that idea of pushing the art form ahead, of trying to come up with something new.”
Akinmusire met his girlfriend and his drummer at Berkeley High School,
Joshua Redman’s alma mater, the unusual secondary school where a musician can
be as popular as an athlete. From the Bay Area, Akinmusire moved to the
Manhattan School of Music, where he met Smith, a transfer student, and Moran,
an alumnus who returned to teach master classes. Smith and Akinmusire’s first
collaboration took place at a Manhattan School big-band rehearsal, where the
burgeoning trumpeter’s talent was startling. After graduating in 2005,
Akinmusire and Smith moved to Los Angeles to attend the Monk Institute. Their
teachers at the institute included Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, who took
the students on a tour of India and Vietnam.
The young trumpeter entered two different trumpet competitions: the
Thelonious Monk International Jazz Trumpet Competition, held for the first time
at Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre, and the Carmine Caruso International Jazz Trumpet
Solo Competition and he won both of them.”
