Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire is part of that generation of west coast jazz musicians – such as Kamasi Washington, Thundercat and Terrace Martin – who appeared on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. But he’s by far the most adventurous musician in that crowd: a soloist who can shift gear from the warm and heart-tugging to the abstract and freaky within the same bar, and a composer whose extended song suites and elliptical song titles (My Inappropriate Soundtrack to a Genocide, for example) show a healthy stylistic restlessness.
Origami Harvest is his most adventurous work to date, a collaboration with the forward-thinking Mivos string quartet and mischievous rapper Kool AD that makes a nonsense of musical categories. Sometimes the self-conscious collisions of free improv and composition, of high and low art, are so discordant that they are almost unlistenable – Free, White and 21 sees Akinmusire whispering the names of dozens of African Americans killed by guns over skittery drums and an Aaron Copland-ish string arrangement, and sounds like three different records playing at once. But elsewhere, pianist Sam Harris, the Mivos Quartet and Akinmusire’s shape-shifting trumpet provide beautifully abstract backings for Kool AD as he lurches between poignant poetry and demotic rap vulgarities. On Americana the Mivos Quartet’s Philip Glass-style minimalism mutates slowly while Kool AD spins out conversational lines about America’s “savage histories, brutal legacies, illusory democracies, feudal tendencies”. On Particle/Spectra, a complex, unresolved fugal arrangement for string quartet and trumpet suddenly bursts into life after five minutes as it mutates into a woozy slice of space-age R&B, featuring Oklahoma singer LmbrJck_T. The result is a voyage through America that is both dreamlike and dystopian, exhausting but oddly compelling.
This month’s other picks
Another twisted voyage through America is conducted by Norwegian guitarist and pedal steel virtuoso Geir Sundstøl. Brødløs, conjures up images of Appalachian hillbillies, Ry Cooder’s soundtrack to Paris, Texas and the mythic America of Ennio Morricone soundtracks. Trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær and tabla player Sanskriti Shrestha are among a fine band leading us down some odd turnings – including a mashup of David Bowie’s Warszawa and John Coltrane’s Alabama.
Gyda Valtysdottir left the Icelandic electronica outfit Mum to pursue her studies as a cellist. Her album Evolution is a delightful series of low-volume miniatures, shifting from Arthur Russell-like cello minimalism to gamelan-style tuned percussion, gently thrumming electronica and whispered, child-like vocals that are oddly reminiscent of Robert Wyatt. Quietly compelling.
