Ambrose Akinmusire: ‘Ugly things aren’t valued any more’

Words are not always a jazz musician's best friend, but they clearly mean a lot to Ambrose Akinmusire. The titles of his compositions – Confessions to My Unborn Daughter, Tear Stained Suicide Manifesto or The Beauty of Dissolving Portraits – are unusually vivid for an instrumental musician. He says that many of his tunes start, not as musical ideas, but as words at the top of a blank sheet of paper.

So the voluminous title of the trumpeter's latest album, The Imagined Savior is Far Easier to Paint, seems a perfect place to start a conversation. But when I get Akinmusire (pronounced Ah-kin-moo-sir-ee) on the phone from California, he steadfastly refuses to discuss its meaning.

“Certain things, when you give explanations or words to them, it sort of freezes them,” he says in a voice that would sound shy if it weren’t clearly underpinned by unshakeable conviction. “And then you can only experience them in that way. It’s like a poem: some poems don’t have one meaning, some poems are supposed to be returned to.”

It’s only the first of many unexpected answers from a serious young man – he turns 33 this week – who has been quietly rising to the top of the pile of the US jazz scene over the past decade.

He was born and raised in Oakland, California, and his first introduction to music was old-school, at the local Baptist church with his mother. He remembers banging on the church piano at the age of four; his mother enrolled him in lessons the following year. Was music a way to keep him off the streets?

“Yeah, Oakland was tough. I was born in 1982 and there was a whole crack epidemic that happened in the US, and remnants of the Black Panther movement, and black civil rights were in the air – maybe more so in Oakland because the Black Panthers were from Oakland.”

He tails off, as if wary of falling back on cliche. “You know, it was just being a young African-American man in the United States, and I think a lot of the musicians from these major cities grew up with similar experiences.”

Everything changed

He chose the trumpet in the school band “because it had three buttons and I thought it would be easy”. Early encounters with renowned musicians such as drummer Billy Higgins and saxophonist Joe Henderson whetted his appetite for jazz. He was still only 17 when he met saxophonist Steve Coleman and everything changed. Coleman, one of the most influential jazz musicians of the past 50 years, is famed for the fiendish complexity of his music.

“He came and did a workshop in my high school. He was demonstrating some kind of rhythmic clave, and he said, ‘Anyone know what’s going on?’, and the whole class looked around at me and my friend Jonathan [Finlayson, another rising star of the US scene]. So we got up and we played, and he said, ‘Okay, come to my house next week,’ and we played with him, and he said, ‘Let’s start a band.’ The next summer I went on tour with him.”

That was 2001. As the decade progressed, Akinmusire developed an increasingly original voice, winning the Thelonious Monk prize in 2007 and finding himself much in demand as a sideman.

He worked with bassist Esperanza Spalding on her world-beating 2008 album Esperanza, with the influential New York composer David Binney – "an unsung hero, man; it's really kind of crazy that he hasn't got the credit that he deserves" – as well as two of the most forward-thinking pianists of the current generation, Vijay Iyer and Jason Moran.

Wherever he turned, the young trumpeter seemed to have a magic touch, like an actor with a knack for picking good scripts, and to each project he gave the sort of full commitment and creative honesty that has become his signature.

But his stock really began to rise to its current level when he signed to Blue Note Records and started recording his own music. His label debut, 2011's When The Heart Emerges Glistening is striking for its fresh, organic sound and the leader's idiosyncratic playing. Trumpeter Terence Blanchard has said that Akinmusire's playing "is not limited to what's normally referred to as trumpet technique". The album was rapturously received by critics worldwide, and is one title he is happy to explain.

“It’s about encouraging people to reveal all sides of themselves. With modern technology, we have the opportunity to present what we believe to be perfect, and I think that has had an effect on music. With Pro Tools you can cut everything up, and you can play this passage over and over until you get it right. Nothing is really raw and ugly things aren’t valued any more, and I really believe that until people are comfortable with revealing the ugly parts of themselves as well as the beautiful parts, we can’t really have an honest dialogue.

“So when you think of a heart and it’s glistening, you think of it as bloody and raw, but it’s also beautiful because it’s a heart. So that album, there’s some mistakes and sloppiness, and it’s not overly mixed, and I think that’s why it really resonated with a lot of people.”

With the release last year of The Imagined Savior, the soft-spoken kid from Oakland became one of the most famous musicians in world jazz, but it's clear that all the attention is water off a duck's back.

“You know, I don’t need it,” he says. “I love, I love, um, actually no, I don’t love it, I’ll just be honest about it. The performance aspect of it is not something that I need. I do understand that I have the ability to affect people and change people and to bring people to this music. You know, music bypasses the brain and goes straight into the heart, so I do understand that. But the attention aspect of it, standing on a stage as an authority, those things are related to ego, and for me that isn’t something that I’ve ever really needed. I know my purpose and I know my gifts, and I don’t pay attention to the attention.”

Charming, humorous, and self-deprecating, Akinmusire is nonetheless a thoughtful and serious musician, one who is always thinking about what he’s doing, and not just when he’s on stage.

“You’re just trying to be yourself in a bunch of different ways. And for me, it even spills over into real life, into this interview. We could have this interview and I could say all the quick things that are easily quotable, but I really am trying to talk to you as if I was talking to a cousin of mine. I really am trying to present my honest self.”

For the clearest picture of Akinmusire, however, he would really much rather you listen to him and his band. Bray Jazz Festival – which kicks off tomorrow – provides the perfect opportunity.

• Ambrose Akinmusire plays the Mermaid arts centre, Bray on Sunday, May 3rd, as part of the 16th annual Bray Jazz Festival. brayjazz.com