http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNzE2nTCtxE&feature=related

I am excited to get my hands on the new Blue Note cd by Bay Area product trumpet player Ambrose Akinmusire, “When The Heart Emerges Glistening.”  When Terry and I went to Rasputin’s to remedy her Mingus problem (she had an obscure Enja recording live in Europe 1964 but nothing with his most famous compositions and performances; we settled on ‘Mingus Ah Um” for starters), we asked also for Ambrose but were told that either they haven’t gotten it yet (April 5 release I had read) or that it had sold through. Alas, record stores. I knew ye.

But the friendly if over-hyped and uber-ubiquitous electronic nervous system and surveillance apparatus kindly lets me sample bits and pieces of new music, so I was able to whet my desire by playing some stuff. I was most intrigued by “My Name is Oscar” which seems to be a tribute to or reaction to the events at BART in which a young man named Oscar Grant was killed wrongly.

Ambrose Akinmusire plays May 22 at SFJAZZ. I first heard him at Stanford Jazz Camp, where he taught at least twice. I also took note that when in 2007 Peter Abfelbaum’s band played at Stanford (and at Freight, I caught them twice, plus interviewed Peter for KZSU) he said in the liner notes “Q/A” that his two favorite musicians under thirty were Ambrose Akinmusire and Dayna Stephens.  I recall driving down to Kuumbwa to catch Ambrose with The LeBoef Brothers, and sat with him for a few minutes before the show; oddly, I also recall getting a parking ticket. And not to continually risk being the weather man taking some credit for the rain, but I recall talking with Andrew Gilbert and suggesting he might want to go to LA to watch Ambrose win the Monk Competition. Actually, Aleta Hayes and I went to the Fillmore once to watch Ambrose in the section of a funk band that was supporting Macy Gray, Brand New Heavies with N’Dea Davenport.

I also recall ringing him out of the blue to put him on the phone with two Stanford summer students — they were shooting around on a campus playground, I was on my way to watch more of the jam sessions — and him asking one of the ladies, who was Nigerian whether she was Igbo or Yoruba.  I get a lot of mileage telling every Nigerian I meet that I produced a Femi Kuti show (at Cubberley, sponsored by Hear Music) but I should make it a point to learn the respective histories of these two tribes, and the colonial and modern histories as well. For a minute there Allette Brooks and Alinah Segobye had me feeling not completely ignorant of Botswanna, if that’s not too big a leap thematically or geographically. Likewise, I just ran into the Kenyan musician Sila and mistook him for an Ethiopian (I had just been speaking with Russ Gershon of Either Orchestra who is traveling to Ethiopia later this spring). Sila said it was his first time back in Palo Alto (he was at Coupa, talking music aps) since his Palo Alto show via Twilights Series in 2008, but I digress, typically (but sort of like JAZZ, YES?). For what it’s worth (and again, hopefully not to big a departure from Ambrose Akinmusire, the Nigerian-American from New York and East Bay) the kingpin of my African jazz pantheon is South African Johnny “Mbizo” Dyani, who played bass in Don Cherry’s band.

What is great about Ambrose Akinmusire is what he shares with all of us (in two senses of the word) and not how he is different than us: shares, what we have in common, also, what he grants us, gives us).  And his tribute to Oscar Grant, as the title of this post indicates, makes me want to stand up and announce my kinship there as well (but probably not as well as Ambrose can and does).

The New York Times noted the release:

“Fruitvale. Human.” I should come back to transpose more of this, the rap. (That’s what the Amazon sample gives us).

edit to add, July 12, 2011: It took me about 90 days, not 19 days, to go back and pick up the Ambrose Akinmusire cd, at Rasputin’s, and listen to the Oscar Grant tribute. What it reminds me of: Peter Brotzmann “Fuck De Boer”, Gil Scott Heron (1943-2011), Keith Knight on GSH, drums at Congo Square, those dudes who play plastic tubs near BART stations, “2001: A Space Oddyssey” only in that AA’s voice-over in the narrative is slightly processed; it sounds a little like a p.a. in a BART station; the trip I took recently on BART merely to take a picture of Sunshine Biscuits signage; listening to it today between Rasputin’s and my secret hideout I noticed a “There Goes the Neighborhood” sign (protesting High Speed Rail but invoking Jim Crow) on Alma and Rinconada — Robert Syrett and I are scheming to try to replace all those with Harriet Tubman-tribute signs saying “Underground Railroad”; today in the news I noticed that a former Cincinnati Bengals NFL player David “Deacon” Jones, 56, was shot and killed outside a convenience store by an Kern County sheriff in Bakersfield. More: strangely, Melia Willis-Starbuck, the 19-year-old Dartmouth student shot by an acquaintance, in 2006; Michael Franti “Television Drug of A Nation”. Public Enemy. Michelle Shocked, “Graffiti Limbo”. Sinead, “Black Boys on Mopeds.”

The performance, track #9, “My name is Oscar” is basically a four-minute drum workout by Justin Brown. But kudos and much respect for Ambrose and crew (including producer Jason Moran, and A&R whiz Eli Wolf, who I first met years ago and stopped him because he wore a Ropeadope windbreaker) for doing this tribute. The “19 days” mentioned in the scant lyrics — which are almost a prayer — refers to the fact that the shooting or murder occurred 19 days before Obama was inaugurated. Something odd about the way AA says “inaugurated” — too close to “naugahyde”. I like the way he repeats and edits the declaration of identify — he has a name, he is not a statistic — until the noun becomes a verb: “I grant.” He is giving Oscar some power. To act. Even posthumously.

http:/6/my-name-is-oscar/

Apropos of this topic I found an excellent and promising blog by Angelika Beener called
Alternate Takes,  from which I also learned of a recent benefit for Dayna Stephens, who has a rare and potentially-deadly kidney disease.

How far have we come since the days of Harriet Tubman?

edit to add, December 30: Nate Chinen of the Times has this number 1 of his best of 2011: