AMBROSE AKINMUSIRE - On The Tender Spot Of Every Calloused Moment

His band's concert has just ended, and Charles Greenlee, trombonist, returns to the shared room with John Coltrane. “Trane” really doesn't want to stop playing, as if the performance just finished had been a mere introduction to something else. He launches into a left-hand exercise on the saxophone's high notes, and Charles leaves him to his own devices almost immediately: better to get some sleep, he thinks. When he wakes up the next morning, he's stunned: John hasn't closed his eyes all night, hasn't stopped repeating that single figure for even a second.

It's Archie Shepp who recounts this anecdote in the heartfelt liner notes accompanying the sixth album as bandleader by trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, in which the legendary saxophonist of "The Cry Of My People", "Attica Blues" and "Fire Music" doesn't hesitate to recognize those very same signs of greatness and dedication. It only takes the first rehearsals with the Attica Blues Orchestra, in 2012, to convince him: whenever his presence isn't required, Ambrose moves out to the garden next to the rehearsal room without ever taking the instrument from his lips, an entity in which the man is utterly indistinguishable from his own sound. It may well be just a minor anecdote, sure, but if this isn't a sign of at least spiritual kinship with a certain strand of jazz's yearning for the Absolute, I don't know what is: it's almost logical, after all, that Akinmusire's trumpet should make a fleeting appearance at the close of "To Pimp A Butterfly", paradoxically the most significant album for jazz in recent years, if only for the number of doors it has opened for anyone lucky enough to orbit around it, whether as a musician or simply as a fan.

Two years ago, "Origami Harvest" sounded like a surprisingly danceable and coherent adventure, given premises that would be hard not to call abstruse: six tracks – average length: ten minutes – that paired the classic jazz quintet with the chamber-music, Philip Glass-like suggestions of the MIVOS Quartet and the hip-hop flavor brought by Kool A.D. Today, instead, the new "On The Tender Spot Of Every Calloused Moment" brings the focus back to an now-consolidated four-piece, almost entirely self-sufficient: the piano of Sam Harris, the double bass of Harish Raghavan, the drums of Justin Brown; conducting it all, Ambrose Akinmusire and his hugely virtuosic trumpet, guiding the unpredictable unfolding of the compositions with the same intensity and attention with which Miles Davis, eyes fixed on the big screen, improvised over the images of Louis Malle's "Ascensore per il patibolo".

The opening is brutal. "Tide Of Hyacinth" is a post-bop magma that for a couple of minutes seems to be wondering where it's headed, at least until the entrance – theatrical, even triumphant – of Harris's piano, sketching out a blistering theme doubled by the trumpet. Yet even this fades back into the shadows soon enough (it only returns at the very end of the track), preferring to hand the spotlight to a passage in Yoruba by Cuban percussionist and singer Jesus Diaz. A frontal assault, the most difficult and knotted composition of them all, right at the opening; a rollercoaster of dazzling ideas that would rather dive into ever-new dead ends than retrace the same path twice, like a sonic rendering of Escher's impossible spaces.

The jewel-like "Mr. Roscoe" belongs to the same canon, though certainly more square-cut and less anxiety-inducing than the glorious opener. But "On The Tender Spot Of Every Calloused Moment" is a moody, living work, an exposed nerve; radical in its will to stage an unmediated emotion, exactly as it is at the moment it's felt – after all, Akinmusire describes it as a blues album, and from that angle the definition makes perfect sense. That's why such maelstroms are followed by moments of quiet melancholy like "Yessss" or – even more so, even better – "Reset": an introspective trumpet, piercing to the point of choking; a moving lyricism at shifting volumes, as if the leader were wandering around the recording room, thinking out loud while piano and cymbals add pathos upon pathos.

"An Interlude" boasts a hugely menacing double-bass intro that – true to its title – grows more intense as it goes on, with waves of approaching drums: another showcase for Brown's devastating drumming, never mere rhythmic support but an emotional commentary of explosive creativity.
The rest is rarefaction: Genevieve Artadi's delicate, pensive vocals on "Cynical Sideliners", for instance, where it's unclear whether the voice is accompanying the electric piano or the other way around. Or "Roy", the album's poetic peak, a memory of his friend, trumpeter Roy Hargrove, translated into a kind of moved funeral procession under New Orleans skies and swollen eyes.
It closes with "Hooded Procession", fittingly: nothing more than scattered Rhodes chords, played at varying distances, in a silent protest against police brutality that feels no need to say a word, because the trauma of the Black community is nothing new; what's changed is that others have finally noticed too, and so it's as if Akinmusire, right from the title, were calling on us to read out the names of those victims, to be the voice of the voiceless.

The last sound heard on "On The Tender Spot Of Every Calloused Moment" is a trill in a major key, and it is the sound of hope: it's wonderful that forty-eight minutes so dense and raw should close this way, rewarding even the casual listener for the effort of making their way through unconventional, often jagged structures. An outstanding instrumentalist, Ambrose Akinmusire, who can hold his own with the very best.

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18/08/2020