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Jazz star Ambrose Akinmusire on Wayne Shorter, quitting Blue Note Records and finding beauty in troubled times

  • The acclaimed trumpeter explains why he left the world’s biggest jazz label – and shares his fears for the coming US election
  • An Oakland gangster first introduced Akinmusire to Wynton Marsalis’s music, while Roy Hargrove and Steve Coleman became early mentors to his meteoric rise

Reading Time:6 minutes
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Jazz musician Ambrose Akinmusire, photographed exclusively for Post Magazine before his Hong Kong debut at Xiqu Centre in July 2024. Photo: Eugene Chen

Last June, Ambrose Akinmusire announced his musical rebirth to the world with Beauty is Enough, a studio album promoted with a cryptic Joan Didion quote: “Maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?”

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Whatever it was, the American trumpeter has certainly made much of the hand he’s been dealt over his two-decade-plus music career, all the while refusing to hew too close to convention.

“You know, I don’t play the game,” says Akinmusire, ahead of his recent Hong Kong debut at the Xiqu Centre, in West Kowloon. “Anything I’ve done, is because I was called to do it or it just came to me musically. I’ve never created music to be popular. I have never made any decision to further my career.”

Completely improvised, recorded in a single four-hour session at Paris’ Church of Saint-Eustache and released on Akinmusire’s own label, Origami Harvest, Beauty is Enough offers a fragile tonic, meant “to combat all the anxiety that we all feel from technology”.

Bold, also, because this Parisian palate cleanser punctuated his departure from Blue Note Records, the 85-year-old jazz behemoth, and signing to a more eclectic, boutique-y label.

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And why? “Freedom,” says Akinmusire.

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