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I met Dan Baum in 2006, in New Orleans. We were listening to John Boutté sing at the DBA club on Frenchmen Street, which was one of the more cathartic things one could do in that still-ravaged city at that time. Jacques Morial, one the city’s great doer of good deeds and maker of especially wise introductions introduced us. Dan’s first words, because I was there reporting with the support of a Katrina Media Fellowship, were pretty much, “So how much money did Open Society give you?” I didn’t even know the guy. But Dan was an old-school reporter—straight to the facts, and why not? Continue reading “Remembering Dan Baum”

In 2008, I watched the Democratic Convention from the lounge of the hospital NICU unit that was my newborn son’s home for the first month of his life. (He was born 8 weeks early; he is and has been perfectly healthy.)

Back then, we were all poised for an election that we hoped would signal the birth of a new moment in this country.

And back then, I was worried about whether New Orleans—the birthplace of Allen Toussaint (who wrote this tune), and the focus of my work at that time—would survive.

I remember that feeling. Continue reading “Your Campaign Theme, Courtesy of Allen Toussaint”

With his latest release, “on the tender spot of every calloused moment” (Blue Note), trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire wrestles with painful truths from the perspective of his life as a Black man in the United States and mines inheritances from his extended musical family.

In a liner note, saxophonist Archie Shepp—who worked notably alongside John Coltrane, and who Akinmusire has recently performed with—likens the trumpeter’s commitment to Coltrane’s legendary discipline and rigor. The fruits of such focus are evident in the confident brilliance of the brief trumpet soliloquy that opens the album’s first track, “Tide of Hyacinth,” and in the cohesiveness of his quartet (including bassist Harish Raghavan, drummer Justin Brown and pianist Sam Harris).

As both a player and a bandleader, Akinmusire is by now an essential voice pointing the way forward in jazz’s ongoing story. Another track, “Mr. Roscoe (consider the simultaneous),” explores the open-minded, multi-layered aesthetic of multi-reedist and composer Roscoe Mitchell, who Akinmusire has also played alongside.

His new album music relies mostly on the complex webs of harmony and rhythm woven with seeming ease by this quartet. Still, the best moments are the sparest, most often owing to the sound of Akinmusire’s horn—especially the ringing notes on “Reset (Quiet Victories & Celebrated Defeats)” that glimmer brightly but dissolve into whispers and pained moans.

That pain is not abstract. Nor is its context. (“Considering our history,” he told me, “my mere existence is resistance.”)

On “My Name Is Oscar,” from his 2011 Blue Note debut release, over a drum solo, Akinmusire read aloud accounts of the shooting of a young black man, Oscar Grant III, by a transit officer in his hometown, Oakland, Calif. On “Rollcall for Those Absent,” from a later album, a child recited the names of those killed in similar circumstances—Amadou Diallo and Trayvon Martin, and on—with accompaniment on Mellotron, an electro-mechanical keyboard.

In January, when Akinmusire recorded the new album’s final track, “Hooded Procession (Read the Names Outloud),” he had not yet heard the name George Floyd. But he knew that list would grow, and he sensed active participation (his instruction to read the names out loud) might be in order. Alone, forsaking his horn, playing glistening chords on a Fender Rhodes electric piano, he takes his time as in a church processional, moving nearly imperceptibly from minor key to major, finding fleeting resolution.

I spoke with Akinmusire twice—first, shortly after the Coronavirus lockdown began, and then again, after the protests began following the murder of George Floyd.

When did the pandemic start affected your life and your career? Continue reading “COVID CONVERSATIONS, Volume 7: Ambrose Akinmusire”