Book Excerpt from Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space, by James Gordon Williams

Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space

by James Gordon Williams

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Dear Readers:

I was recently introduced to a book of importance to those with an interest in the interaction of improvisational music and racial and gender politics.

Published in 2021, James Gordon Williams’ . Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space (University Press of Mississippi) illuminates the cultural work being done by five creative musicians between 2005 and 2019. The political thought of these Black jazz improvisers—trumpeters Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire, drummers Billy Higgins and Terri Lyne Carrington, and pianist Andrew Hill—is at the book’s core, presented as multi-layered case studies that demonstrate how these artists communicate their positionality via their music.

In this entire chapter from the book (augmented by audio tracks being discussed), the author analyzes four of Akinmusire’s compositions—“My Name Is Oscar” (2011), “Confessions to My Unborn Daughter” (2011), “Rollcall for Those Absent” (2014), and “Free, White and 21” (2018)—to explain how the trumpeter crosses bar lines through the expression of his political views and lived geography, notably his critique of police brutality that has, as the trumpeter states, “become a leitmotif throughout my albums.”

Gratitude to Mr. Williams for the effort, desire and intelligence required to create this fascinating study, and to he and his publisher for granting me permission to share this excellent example of it with you.

Joe Maita

Editor/Publisher

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This excerpt is from Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space by James Gordon Williams, Copyright © 2021 by University Press of Mississippi. Republished with permission of University Press of Mississippi.

The text is augmented by the music (via Youtube) being discussed.

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People live before us leave a memory behind;
Actions done, actions written,
acts impressed upon our mind,
forming, moving in a circle,
ghosts appearing through the sound,
waving at us from the distance,
’cause the whole wide world is round
and round, and round and round
Yes the whole wide world is round

—Abbey Lincoln

(from “Wholly Earth,” by Abbey Lincoln)

…..Through his improvised performance art and compositions on Origami Harvest (2018), The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint (2014), and When the Heart Emerges Glistening (2011), African American trumpeter and composer Ambrose Akinmusire’s music reveals a complex understanding of Black humanity in his practice of musical space-making. This manifests in a spiritual relationship with ancestral masters of improvisation, a deep understanding of his complex positionality in the world from the nexus of Oakland culture, and a commitment to bringing attention to the murder of Black men and women by members of police departments in communities across the United States. He exploits the sonic color line that Jennifer Stoever critiques, challenges the essentialized theoretical frameworks of Black music that Nina Sun Eidsheim deconstructs, and shamelessly expresses his sonic humanity in the performance and recordings of his music—a physicality of the kind that David Ake argues should be analyzed by musicologists.

…..Akinmusire’s poetic titles of his compositions point to his understanding of the multilayered liminality of Black musical space that comes from a Black sense of place, values he expresses in his musical work. A man of quiet intensity with a clear mission to deconstruct the binarial extremes that constitute the political field of American life, Akinmusire embraces these dualities by critiquing state violence and white supremacy with musical statements that reveal his concepts of Black spatiality.

…..His musical statements do not have innovation as a goal. Akinmusire’s broad project is about realizing the unrealized ambitions of the ancestors that improvise music through him. Like the turf dancing of Oakland, Akinmusire’s musical gestures are about freedom, generating a positive Black sense of space right where you are. Black codes be damned!

…..The cultural work of Ambrose Akinmusire (b. 1982) continues the African American tradition of using creative practices to expose injustice and critique racial violence. As I explain in the Introduction, I use the metaphorical phrase and theoretical hook “crossing bar lines” to describe the phenomenological relationship between African American improvisers’ use of unconventional and experimental music strategies and their need to articulate Black humanity through improvisation. The artistic expression of Black humanity occurs on many different registers beyond resistance. Understanding how a Black artist like Ambrose Akinmusire practices space-making is to understand what is politically at stake for African American cultural workers in their fight for social justice.

…..Akinmusire’s socially conscious music provides an opportunity for an exciting case study of why improvisation in the cause for human rights is always immediate and yet must be historically contextualized. I analyze four of his compositions—“My Name Is Oscar” (2011),“Confessions to My Unborn Daughter” (2011),“Rollcall for Those Absent” (2014), and “Free, White and 21” (2018)—to explain how Akinmusire crosses bar lines through the expression of his political views and lived geography.

…..Ambrose Akinmusire’s compositions are connected to the African American tradition of performing critical consciousness through creative improvisation. It is important to understand Akinmusire’s work within the context of the national grassroots movement to end police brutality. In recent times, the multiracial social protest to end police violence has congealed and resonated internationally under the Black Lives Matter movement. Historical accounts teach us that the killing of African Americans is linked to the perception of Blacks; a perpetual criminalization of Blacks that motivates daily violent acts in America and abroad. As historian Robin D. G. Kelley argues, the American legal and political systems date from the history of settler colonialism and are predicated on the belief systems of white privilege and supremacy. The containment of Black, brown, and red populations was, and continues to be rooted in, seeing those populations as a threat to white property. While post-emancipation Blacks thrived in the Reconstruction period by holding public office, armed white citizens stripped Black people of those democratic gains. Not surprisingly, the techniques of demonizing Blacks by characterizing them as predators laid the groundwork for restricting Black progress through legal, political, and violent strategies. Understanding this historical framework helps us understand the societal environment where African American citizens like Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Yvette Smith, Rekia Boyd, and so many others are continually killed. I now turn to the particular story of Oscar Grant, a fellow Oaklander, whose death personally affected Akinmusire and motivated him to create his first recorded critique of systemic state violence against Black people.

My Name Is Oscar

…..Twenty-two-year-old African American butcher’s apprentice Oscar Grant III was killed while handcuffed and with his face pressed against the ground by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer Johannes Mehserle in the early hours of January 1, 2009. Judging from the cacophonous sound of shock and horror of many witnesses who viewed the incident through BART subway doors and windows, Grant was perceived to be executed by Mehserle. Evidence of the shooting is documented in the plethora of amateur videos taken by subway riders that continue to circulate on YouTube. The running commentaries below these videos are a narrative of immediate calls for justice and anger at the police.

…..One day after Grant’s murder, the multiracial community outcry was swift, angry, and fierce. Major demonstrations in the Bay Area resulted in approximately 120 arrests. Widespread protests were not just a response to what was viewed by many to be another execution of a Black man by the police. The older protesters in the community remembered the “Riders Case” of the early 2000s, which involved a group of Oakland police officers accused of abusing and planting drugs on subjects. The case remains in the public memory, and the Grant murder stirred up angst and anger emanating from decades of distrust between Oakland’s Black community and the Oakland police.

…..Twenty-eight-year-old police officer Mehserle, initially charged by a Los Angeles jury with the more serious crime of second-degree murder, was found guilty in July 2010 of a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter, plus a gun enhancement charge that could have added up to ten years to his sentence. Judge Robert Perry in November sentenced Mehserle to two years in state prison, overturning the jury’s gun enhancement decision. Mehserle’s prison sentence was widely perceived as insignificant and insufficient for the murder of Grant. This judicial asymmetry spurred some Oakland community members from peaceful protest to violent acts.

…..Under the theme My Name Is Oscar, various artists formed a collective stance against the Oscar Grant shooting and police violence through diverse artistic mediums. The songs, music videos, posters, poems, paintings, and graffiti that erupted in response to Grant’s death are examples of artistic expression at “a critical moment in the movement to end police violence.” African American film director Ryan Coogler chronicled the last hours of Grant’s life in Fruitvale Station (2013).

…..Trumpeter and composer Ambrose Akinmusire’s composition “My Name Is Oscar” (2011), from his first Blue Note album, is connected to the tradition of critical improvisation and the international movement to end police brutality. Because Akinmusire is a Black Oaklander, it is no surprise that police brutality issues resonate with him. Akinmusire believes that music must ask the questions that challenge belief systems about race, systems that perpetuate ignorance about people who are different from those considered acceptable—in ethnicity, in power, in socioeconomic status. He notes: “these are real concerns I have. I read a great interview with Maya Angelou conducted by bell hooks, and in it she says, ‘Art is not a luxury The artist explains to us, or at least asks the questions which must be asked… that’s what the artist is supposed to do, to liberate us from our ignorance.’” Finding the space in his music to ask these questions did not come immediately or naturally. When Akinmusire was first signed to Blue Note records, he was ambivalent about creating work that critiqued police brutality in his community. Raised in North Oakland, he had “survivor’s guilt” from not being one of the many Black people killed by the police. After releasing the album, he explained to me that his composition about Oscar Grant gave him opportunities to educate his national and international audiences about American police brutality while on tour:

…..I’m from a very poor community in Oakland. I didn’t grow up poor. I grew up with my mom, and she had a great job. When I signed to Blue Note Records, I felt I needed to remind myself that I was still not only from there [Oakland] but, in a lot of people’s eyes, I was equal to Oscar Grant. I was still just a Black man. I wanted to find a way to connect myself to my community on my albums. In America, when you’re a Black person heading to success, the first thing they try to do is separate you from your community. They say, “He’s different; he’s a good one.” I wanted them to know that I am the same; I am the same as the dude you just killed. I really am! These people are from my community, we have mutual friends.

…..And later on, I began to have these conversations around the world. I would go to Kiev and other random places in the world. People would ask me about Oscar Grant, and I realized that it was an opportunity to tell people about my experiences as a young Black man, around the world. I’ve had a conversation about Oscar Grant in Johannesburg and realized many South Africans hadn’t even heard about the murder of Grant. That’s super deep. My critique of police brutality has become a leitmotif throughout my albums.

…..For any serious listener of Akinmusire’s music, this leitmotif is readily apparent—and what this chapter is dedicated to exploring.

…..Recalling his musical and social training, Akinmusire tells the story of how he “almost grew up in a Black Conscious museum”; older African American male musicians, many of them former Black Panthers, guided his musician-ship and influenced his worldview. The men of this Black activist generation were the postwar children of Southern migrants drawn to the Bay Area in the 1940s and 1950s to find work in the shipbuilding defense industry. As historian Donna Murch describes, the defense economy was strong, and the living conditions purportedly better than in the South. However, with “a disappearing industrial base” and segregation—fomented by white flight to the suburbs and growing populations of Southern Black migrants—job opportunities decreased.

…..In 1980, two years before Akinmusire was born, Oakland was majority Black, and had 131,127 more Blacks than whites. The state and city governments responded to the changing demographics by creating profiling programs to identify Black juvenile delinquents. These programs led to police harassment, which led to arrests and high Black incarceration numbers.

…..Black Studies programs were the catalysts for the creation of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and not the product of the movement. The intellectual base of organizations like the BPP grew out of protests for curriculum changes, as colleges had no Black history courses that reflected Black people’s contributions to the world. The “Black Conscious[ness] museum” that Akinmusire references was not a museum but a living, spatial repository of historical and cultural knowledge from community members who directly shaped his aesthetic choices. His understanding of his Blackness and music developed first in the Black church, then further through the street elders who taught him about improvisation and Black musical space from an alternative, pedagogy, one developed in those marginalized spaces outside of institutional jazz education. Akinmusire explains:

…..That’s the way I came to this music. I grew up in a Baptist church and I played piano in church from the age of three. Then I went to jazz camp when I was thirteen or fourteen, where I met all these old-school musicians. And they eventually took a liking to me. They would come and pick me up from my house, and instead of giving me a lesson with a horn, we would go to the record shop.

…..Some of Akinmusire’s mentors would take him to flea markets at six in the morning, and they would search the record bins for jazz records that would provide the curriculum that shapes his approach to improvisation today. The key lesson his mentors sought to impart was that improvisation is a reflection of life and not abstract notation or theory. In fact, he did not have traditional music lessons until much later: “I didn’t start dealing with notes until college. Like Kenny Dorham is playing these notes over this chord. That’s not the way I was taught. I was taught, ‘He plays this way because he lives this way.’ I was so lucky to come into it [jazz education] that way.”

…..As I argue throughout this text, the production of Black musical space comes directly from lived experience and reveals what is politically at stake for the artist. Akinmusire’s creative process confronts the extremes that constitute Black life. He creates compositions and performance art that addresses issues that have traumatized Black people in his community and throughout urban America. In comments about his album Origami Harvest (2018), Akinmusire describes his motivation to compose “My Name Is Oscar” as well as other compositions that seek to enunciate Black social life while drawing attention to systemic forces and ideologies that promote social inequality and Black mortality. His surreal visions reimagine Black life as harvesting beauty and freedom instead of pain:

…..That is what Origami Harvest is about. It’s about these extremes and putting them really close together and trying to experience them both at the same time in the way I experience life. Origami is about the different ways we have to fit into society. Harvest is the cycle of it. I put these words together based on my vision of a sharecropper. It’s a sepia-colored image of this guy at the end of the day with a satchel full of origami that he had been in the field folding. And instead of this painful thing, he was in the field creating beauty. At the end of the day, the sharecropper did not have a satchel full of cotton but a satchel full of origami.

…..The extremes that Akinmusire feels and expresses in his music result, on the one hand, from his deep cognizance of the institutional and structural racism that shapes Black people’s quality of life while, and on the other, having white friends for whom he cares deeply. “What is it like to feel and know all of these things, to have white friends that you really love but with a heightened awareness of how you are being perceived? With this album, I was trying to find an outlet for all of these things. Sometimes, it can be stifling, you know.” The experiences Akinmusire discusses here connect to what motivated Terence Blanchard to write the composition “See Me As I Am” (2015) which I discuss in Chapter 1. As sociologist Avery Gordon argues, the complexity of a marginalized people’s collective personhood demands the ability to simultaneously face systemic inequality and violence while imagining a better future without those social ills. Embracing quotidian despair, while disciplining one’s mind to imagine a better future, is a necessary critical praxis for surviving in the world.

…..Akinmusire distinguishes his work from antipolice songs, such as those of the late 1980s Compton, California–based rap group N.W.A (Niggas With Attitude). Though clearly saddened by the killing of Grant and the Mehserle verdict, Akinmusire decided to tell the story of Oscar Grant in a creative and provocative way that reminds the world of Grant’s humanity:

…..I just want people to know the story. I don’t want it to become this “f*ck the police anthem.” . . . Every time I go back home [Oakland] I’m reminded of it, people still talk about it, it’s still such a big thing because he [Mehserle] got off with just two years, he didn’t get charged with murder. It just really resonates with me because I feel like it could have been me or anyone. The piece begins with me observing what happens, then me talking in the voice of Oscar Grant himself.

Listen to “My Name Is Oscar” [Universal Music Group]

…..Crossing bar lines by letting the deceased Oscar Grant speak through his voice, the performance of “My Name Is Oscar” reveals how fully Akinmusire identifies with being a possible recipient of police brutality. The analytical portion of this chapter begins with a study of Akinmusire’s first offering in his compositional critique of police violence, racism, and white supremacy. The initial impression one may get from listening to “My Name Is Oscar” is of a spoken-word recitation by Akinmusire with improvised drum accompaniment responding in real time to his fragmentary poetic statements about the events surrounding the killing of Oscar Grant. Yet “My Name Is Oscar” is a presentation that manipulates listener perception. Akinmusire’s spoken word is performed and choreographed in response to the arc of drummer Justin Brown’s prerecorded improvisation. This drum improvisation was removed from a different recording session (specifically, from a composition by saxophonist Walter Smith III). Both Brown and Smith III are longtime members of the Ambrose Akinmusire Quintet. “My Name Is Oscar” features a stark contrast between Brown’s asymmetrically vibrant drumming and the calm voice of Akinmusire. In this way, Akinmusire’s spoken-word performance breaks with conventional jazz performances; audiences often imagine improvising musicians responding to live poetry readings, exemplified by New York City’s East Village Nuyorican Café poetry slams. Akinmusire devised a musical strategy for recording the poem dedicated to Oscar Grant: he practiced reading the poem with the prerecorded drum improvisation several times and then choreographed the reading to Brown’s prerecorded, improvised drum solo.

…..Treated with vocal effects throughout the composition, Akinmusire’s voice sonically represents Oscar Grant, a man physically dead but whose spirit here is reanimated. Eschewing the linear narrative common in traditional storytelling, Akinmusire has orchestrated his words into a nonlinear list of signifiers related to the events surrounding the killing (see table 4.1). Embodying Grant’s spirit, Akinmusire constructs him as a lone voice who humanizes himself in fragmentary declarations.

…..The first phrase, “My name is Oscar,” begins at fifteen seconds. Akinmusire states this introductory line in monotone fashion. The rhythm of the phrase comprises a staccato sixteenth note beamed to an eighth note for “my name,” then musical space followed by an eighth note and two sixteenth notes for “is Oscar.” The words “Fruitvale,” “human,” “apology,” and the remaining phrases are deliberately stated, with space in between for dramatic effect.

…..Complex hand drumming continues, with the drummer’s left foot keeping a steady quarter-note beat on hi-hat. Akinmusire uses his voice in a series of rhythmic divisions that include quarter notes, sixteenth notes, eighth notes, and eighth-note triplets. While Brown’s hand drumming becomes more complex through increased rhythmic interplay between the snare drum and tom-toms, Akinmusire’s voice remains contrastingly subtle.

…..Akinmusire also emphasizes the rhythm and meaning of the text by separating syllables and drawing out phrases. For example, at 1:46, Officer Mehserle’s last name is divided defiantly and mockingly into three rhythmic syllables. The arc of Akinmusire’s phrase is in stark contrast to the previous monotone statements. At 2:39 the word “live” is elongated for dramatic effect in response to the increased velocity and cymbal crashes of the drummer.

Time of Verse Launching	Spoken Word(s)	Drumming Evolution	Vocal Dynamics & Rhythm
0:15	my name is Oscar	hand drumming	quarter-note cymbal
0:38	Fruitvale	hand drumming, ride cymbal crash	staccato (sixteenth note beamed to an eight)
0:50	human	hand drumming with quarter-note cymbal	monotone eighth notes/piano
1:07	apology	hand drumming, with quarter-note cymbal and tom drum	monotone/ eighth note and one grouping of eighth-note triplets/ piano
1:22	nineteen days	hand drumming with quarter-note cymbal	monotone/ two quarters and a half note/ piano
1:27	Inauguration [Obama 2009]	hand drumming begins to intensify	monotone/ four sixteenth notes and a quarter note/ piano
1:36–1:37	my name is Oscar	hand drumming continues to intensify	Sentence drawn out for dramatic effect. There is a space between “name” and “Oscar”
1:46	Meh-ser-le	asymmetrical interplay between drums is increased	calls out police officer’s name defiantly and mockingly/ slightly higher pitch range
2:00	I Am You!	after some space, switches to drumsticks/ two cymbal crashes after spoken word	vocal intensity and speed increases; stated in a declarative fashion/ higher pitch range
2:09	Don’t Shoot!	barrage of cymbal crashes in higher pitch range	more vocal drama and intensity/ pointillistic enunciation with drama
2:27	Oakland	fury of cymbal crashes continues	stated with defiance and pride in the city
2:39	Live . . .	Increased velocity of cymbal crashes mixed with snare drums	elongated, dramatic phrasing
2:52	my name . . . is Oscar	speed, volume and intensity of drumming climax	stated louder and more defiantly, but legato this time
3:17	we are the same	drumming still intense but begins to dissipate	even sixteenth notes in declarative style
3:23	my name . . . is Oscar . . . I am . . . Grant . . . I grant	drums fade out quickly with cymbal reverberation	Akinmusire’s voice trails off with, layered echo effect

Table 4.1. “My Name Is Oscar” Performance Graphic

This table is a graphic representation of Akinmusire’s performance of “My Name Is Oscar” (2011), which constructs a fragmentary narrative about key events surrounding the killing of Oscar Grant. Akinmusire uses strategies of timing, fragmentary spoken text, and various prerecorded textures of rhythmic drumming that articulates the narrative arc of the performance.

…..Akinmusire’s use of space between his spoken phrases, combined with the subtle drama of his monotone voice, is the result of knowing in advance where drummer Justin Brown was going to switch to drumsticks from hand drumming, radically changing the texture, speed, and pitch of his improvisation. Knowing where Brown’s solo would climax, Akinmusire chose that time frame to state the most dramatic, humanizing words of the poem, awaiting a barrage of cymbal crashes and rapid succession of sixteenth notes to declare, at 2:00, “I am you!” and at 2:09, “Don’t shoot!” Such pointillistic speech is another strategy of Akinmusire’s creation of musical space.

…..The last effect of Akinmusire’s duo performance is the layered echo of Akinmusire’s initial statement,“My name is Oscar.” To emphasize this statement, Akinmusire’s voice is treated with an echo effect just as the drums fade out with decrescendo cymbal reverberation. The reverb, applied to both the voice and the drums, connotes the doubleness and ephemerality that Black people feel when their lives are truncated by violent means.

…..“My Name Is Oscar” was not a singular event of music protest by Akinmusire. He continued the project of bringing attention to police brutality in his second album release.

“Rollcall for Those Absent”: The List Grows

…..“Rollcall for Those Absent,” a three-minute-and-thirty-eight-second composition from Akinmusire’s recording The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint (2014), represents the continuation of Akinmusire’s project of drawing attention to Black males who have been killed by various police officers in the United States.

Listen to “Rollcall For Those Absent” [Universal Music Group]

…..Foregrounded in the composition is the voice of a young girl, Muna Blake, who lists the names of Black males killed by police in recent decades. Blake’s recitation of the names is designed to remind the listener that the slain Black men were somebody’s children as well. Akinmusire explains, “Having a young voice read the names, it’s like the beginning of life talking about the end of life.” Using children to sing jazz on protest albums is not without precedent. Archie Shepp’s “Quiet Dawn” on Attica Blues (1972) features the singing of the seven-year-old daughter of its composer and flugelhornist Cal Massey. Pianist and composer Robert Glasper, on the same Blue Note label as is Akinmusire, conspicuously uses the same compositional strategy of having a child read the names of slain Black people in his “I’m Dying of Thirst” (2015); but Glasper’s band vamps underneath the reading, whereas Akinmusire’s music that features keyboardist Sam Harris on “Rollcall” is through-composed.

…..The youthfulness of Blake’s voice is emphasized by the way she sometimes struggles with pronouncing this list of the deceased. Many of the names are recognizable because grassroots protests led to news coverage of their deaths. These names include Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Ousmane Zongo, and Trayvon Martin—he being the thematic anchor of the list. Killed two years before the release of this recording, Martin’s death sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. Martin’s name is recited strategically in the composition to emphasize his story and his youth relative to the slain adult Black males. Martin’s name is made more prominent, not more important, by being repeated more than the others. Akinmusire understands all of these killings as equally tragic; yet he accentuates the pronouncement of the name Trayvon Martin, as his death was the most famous case of violence against an unarmed Black child at that time.

…..It is understandable that Akinmusire identifies with Black males killed by the police because he too is a Black male and sees himself as a potential victim of police violence. Still, his “Rollcall” is incomplete without listing the names of African American women. Critical race theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw argues that the dominant, analytical framework for understanding racial violence has been largely male-oriented, since racial violence, typically understood through the brutal and theatrically symbolic technology of lynching, has historically been designed to emasculate individual Black males and Black manhood. The glaring absence of African American women’s names in “Rollcall for Those Absent” is later addressed in “Free, White and 21,” in which Akinmusire recites the names of Yvette Smith, Shereese Francis, and Miriam Carey, unarmed African American women killed by the police. Akinmusire, who plays a Juno synthesizer, joins Sam Harris on the Mellotron to create the homophonic accompaniment that is the sonic backdrop to “Rollcall.” Their combined sounds convey a funeral service, improvised music moving like a procession, flowing in nonmetric time and creating an aura of ecclesiastical reverence, gravitas, and solemnity. This composition is designed to suggest a public mourning for Black men. The layer of improvised drumming adds timbral dynamics to the organ sound and contextualizes the spoken text with splashes of rhythmic colors.

…..Akinmusire’s Juno synth in “Rollcall” begins with a low-pitched rumble immediately followed by a slow, chromatic glissando into a brief major 7th chord. The opening chord is followed by increasingly complex polychords led by a higher-pitched melody. This sonic musical strategy is also used by Akinmusire in his composition “Americana/The Garden Waits for You to Match Her Wilderness” (2018). There he plays a Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard manufactured in 1985 to juxtapose a snakelike, bending, high-pitched melody to contrast the texture of the strings. In both pieces, Akinmusire uses extreme pitch registers to represent the spatialized extremes that Black people face while living in the world. He endeavors to make those sounds sonically legible stating, “sounds that are really high and really low are like the beginning and the end.”

…..The nonfunctionality of the haunting chord progressions of “Rollcall” keeps me off kilter for its three and a half plus minutes. For those familiar with the standard repertoire of Black church music, there is no familiar hymn or refrain to orient the listener as we hear the names of the dead repeated by the young Muna Blake over the glissando melody. By using unconventional and haunting chord patterns, Akinmusire’s music suggests that no social cadence or resolution is possible as long as these systemic patterns of anti-Blackness and violence continue.

…..At the very end of “Rollcall,” Trayvon Martin’s name is linked thematically and compositionally to Oscar Grant’s, whom Blake names with echoing finality. The thematic link to “My Name Is Oscar” is clear: both compositions address the tragic deaths of Black males while humanizing them through the Black tradition of saying their names. A compositional link is also revealed in the production techniques: each name is enhanced with reverb effect and repeated several times in fragmentary permutations at the end of the composition.

…..In his composition “Free, White and 21”—a title borrowed from Howardena Pindell’s video installation Free, White and 21 (1980), which explores her tribulations with white racism as she appears as a white woman and her African American self—the list of those killed by the police now includes Black women as well as men. The expression “free, white and 21,” no longer commonly heard today, was also a popular mantra in white character movie dialogues from the 1920s through the 1950s and cinematically reflected the unapologetic structural and systemic white supremacy of its time. The core of Akinmusire’s composition, however, is in how he points to another lyrical irony in a church hymn often sung in the Black church.

Listen to “Free, White and 21” [Universal Music Group]

…..Akinmusire highlights the irony of how for generations Black people have been singing the Christian anthem “We Are Soldiers,” which includes a lyric about “the blood-stained banner.” Long considered a symbol of the fight for civil rights but also a term for a symbol of white supremacy, the Blood Stained Banner is the name of the third national flag used by Southern proslavery actors in the last month of the American Civil War. As part of the performance, Akinmusire whistles part of “We Are Soldiers,” about which he remarks: “I wanted to sneak it in there. The only part that I vocalize is the ‘blood-stained banner.’ I wanted it to sound like it emerged and also do it in a way that was soulful enough to still be respectful to people that have passed away, trying to really extract the blues out of all that stuff.” The screams that Akinmusire orchestrates signify the insanity of the violence perpetrated on Black bodies throughout American history. The sounds of the snare drum connote the militaristic element of the song expressed in these words: “We have to hold up the blood-stained banner / We have to hold it up until we die!” Akinmusire wants to draw our attention to the lack of historical understanding among Black people who sing the song without understanding what the words truly signify: “I can remember that was a song we used to sing during the collection of offering. We would be marching around giving money to the church. That’s dark.” When Akinmusire states that “we are not protest songs” at 2:35, as the string ensemble lays a harmonic bed, he is telling the listener not to conflate Black people with the issues they perpetually fight to bring to the fore of society’s consciousness for social change. He told me, “I have a problem with artists, both Black and other, using the deaths of Black people for commercial reasons.” Black people struggle against structural racism, but they would prefer for structural racism not to exist; they would prefer to be completely free, understood as fully human. Black suffering shouldn’t be a fetishized soundtrack for the white imaginary and insatiable voyeurism. Akinmusire addresses the darkness in these historical racial codes in American culture because his mission is to be a musical truth teller, which is reflected in his production of spatially raw and glistening aesthetic that reflects his understanding of the Black aesthetic.

Grotesque Pulchritude: The Black Musical Space of the Glistening Heart

…..Akinmusire wanted his album When the Heart Emerges Glistening (2011) to be a statement against the production values of today’s music. Whether it is the ubiquitous use of Auto-Tune to correct out-of-tune pitches or the use of Pro Tools music software to make a specific part of a musical arrangement or improvisation perfect, Akinmusire rebels against such aesthetic values by creating a less technologically mediated sound that viscerally brings listeners into his creative process. For Akinmusire, the practice of musical space-making must reveal the beauty and the imperfection of Black humanity, and humanity in general:

…..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 reso-nated with a lot of people.

…..The performance of the Black aesthetic is not polished, perfect, or refined in the way defined by what theorist George E. Lewis calls Eurological aesthetics. Yet Akinmusire, like African American improvisers in general, does not believe in substandard instrumental performances. On the contrary, he has practiced countless hours over several years to achieve the opportunity to document his musical vision on a major label. Rather, Akinmusire believes and celebrates risk and intangibility.

…..Akinmusire uses the visual symbol of the exposed heart that is within him, yet displaced, as an abstract symbol of humanity. There is a direct link between his philosophy about open dialogue and his musical strategies of applying space between the notes, exploring the full range of his trumpet, the play of double consciousness between two extreme registers, and tirelessly searching for new ideas as he improvises.

Listen to “Confessions To My Unborn Daughter” [Universal Music Group]

“Confessions to My Unborn Daughter”

…..In “Confessions to My Unborn Daughter” (2011), the first track on When the Heart Emerges Glistening, Akinmusire’s deployment of respatialization and a Black sense of time in his compositional and improvisational strategies merit careful analysis. “Confessions” has two sections. The A section of the composition is in E minor, where the ensemble of improvisers explore the mode with a blues sensibility. The recording begins with a solo trumpet improvisation by Akinmusire, who plays a meditative rumination over several scales. Moments later he signals the rest of the band to come in with a perfect-fourth figure from B to E. These notes are also played as a thematic interlude between solo sections as a way of tying together the musical narrative and compositional form:

Musical example 4.1. Perfect fourth figure from B to E.

…..When Akinmusire calls the rest of the ensemble with that perfect-fourth figure, the rhythm section responds. Pianist Gerald Clayton initially responds with chords in high and low registers of the piano, then eventually picks up and performs the B–E figure of the call. The rest of the rhythm section responds to the pianist’s call on the first beat. The pianist responds in turn by playing on downbeats of the measures in response to the trumpet, as a way of grounding the rhythm section. Clayton then leads the rhythm sec-tion by taking up the perfect-fourth figure while the rest of the rhythm section responds in kind. The A section’s focus on E minor during the solo is expanded through rhythm, and the form of the composition seemingly disappears. Musical illusions are created when the 3/4 time signature appears but then quickly dissolves into a sea of metric modulations. On hearing this performance listeners may believe the musicians have left the compositional form altogether. However, it is clear that they expand the sense of time as they cue each other through the form.

…..Akinmusire’s concept of ensemble technique is revealed in the way the stated melody develops quickly into collective improvisation that features no particular musician. Akinmusire resists playing his composition’s melody in a clear way, countering the approach typically taken to teach the listener the melodic and harmonic form of a piece. Akinmusire wants to envelop himself in Black sense of musical space because, for him, the performance is not about the individual soloist but about the lived geography of the collective group. Moreover, recent Black music, such as chopped and screwed music—recorded music slowed and treated with digital effects and choppiness—blurs clear distinctions. Akinmusire explained his musical philosophy to me this way:

…..That’s the way I grew up, man. You ride or die with your community and your homies. That’s number one. I’ve been playing with drummer Justin Brown for twenty-two years. Walter Smith, the tenor player, I’ve been playing with him for eighteen years. Most of the people in my band, there was a time when they weren’t the popular ones. We just stuck it out because it felt like a family. And as far as hierarchy is concerned, that’s just the way I hear music, man. Sometimes I feel like a conductor as opposed to a leader. And also the whole idea of taking a solo, that just seems so dated. I think in music in general, that has stopped. Even if you listen to things like trap and hip-hop, just music isn’t like that anymore. Everything is melded into this collective thing in all styles of modern music [my emphasis]: classical, hip-hop, jazz, R&B. You’re like, “Is this a hook? Are they rapping or are they singing?” And also, I don’t need the attention. If this music was just about me, if I was just doing this for Ambrose, I would have stopped touring a long time ago. I don’t need the attention of the stage, lights, and glamour.

…..There is no conventional hierarchy between bandleader and sidemen, no division of labor in terms of how the music is arranged or performed. Resisting small-group bebop convention, Akinmusire shares the melody equally with saxophonist Walter Smith III, who provides a timbral contrast and intellectual foil to Akinmusire’s improvised lines. They are not communicating the space-making cartography of hierarchical domination but the opposite. There is no competition for musical space in the interplay between saxophone and trumpet.

…..The melody dissolves rapidly into collective improvisation between these two lead instruments and the rhythm section of piano, bass, and drums. The melody of the piece, which varies quite rapidly without any concern for establishing a clear centralized melody, occurs over a chord progression largely based in E minor. Akinmusire leads the band in blurring the lines between playing the theme and collective spontaneous composition, which traditionally are separate sections of a performance. The band never repeats the melody in the same way, demonstrating Akinmusire’s willingness to challenge traditional jazz performance hierarchies in terms of who states the melody and who improvises first. The improvisations among Smith, Akinmusire, and the rhythm section represent a balance between free improvisation and improvising within a clear structure. As Akinmusire explains:

…..Why do I have to wait until after the head to solo? . . . Why can’t I begin with a solo? Why do I have to solo at all? For a long time, I’ve been trying to break through the forms. That’s why I surround myself with musicians who are also willing to break down forms. When we play these tunes live this year, they won’t sound like they do on the album. Anything I create is something to be manipulated and explored, and I trust the musicians to do whatever they feel. Even if I go, “Damn, why did they do that?” I still trust them. Sometimes you might be in the middle of the solo and someone else will come in, and that will be OK. Anything goes. And I mean anything.

Harmonic Dissolution

…..Akinmusire’s configurations suggest that he works within his own system of tonality while also working outside of that system in an E minor blues tonality. His harmonic scheme for “Confessions” avoids conventional harmonic resolution, and his melodic scheme reflects highly chromatic concepts. The harmonies of “Confessions” do not form a harmonic progression in the Western sense of the term but a repeated, acoustic bass–driven diatonic chord cycle that does not stray from the E minor modal sound.

…..The chord progression that Akinmusire creates in 3/4 is based on E minor,
C# minor7 (b5), C major7, with a passing slash chord of G major/B. These
cycles of chords are followed by the A minor chord, which precedes a whole
step down to a G major chord, which “resolves” to E minor. The harmonic
rate has each following chord shift on the third beat of the measure. For
example, C#minor7 in the first bar, the E minor chord in the second bar, and
G major on the third beat of bae 3 all demonstrate this pattern of shifting on each measure’s third beat.

…..The contrasting B section is an exercise in harmonic oscillation between two major chords, C major and E major, a major third apart. After the rugged, blues quality of the extended E minor riff in the first section, these chords in the B section function as a release from the minor blues sound, bringing different harmonic colors to the composition.

…..How does Akinmusire musically address ideas of race, spatial marginalization, and time as he negotiates his personhood on the outskirts of civil society? The way he represents Black musical space and rhythm in his improvisation, the way he plays inside and outside harmony, relates to his being at both the center and the periphery of society at the same time. His performance simultaneously represents strategies of resistance and the exploration of Black ontological space through sound.

…..Akinmusire’s unconventional melodic phrases are important because they demonstrate his conception toward shaping musical space. He plays several unconventional, asymmetrical phrases of large intervals in his improvisation; these are played motivically, with a repertoire of different timbres, and out of time.

…..Akinmusire represents his own timeline of Blackness by playing non-chord tones over E minor. While he plays freely with a high degree of chromaticism, he is always mindful of his harmonic scheme or changes. Avoiding musical clichés, Akinmusire departs from the bebop tradition of trumpet performance that relies on scalar linearity to make musical statements. Although trumpeters Clifford Brown, Henry Red Allen, Don Cherry, and other trumpet players have influenced Akinmusire’s style, he is a conduit for their spirits while working beyond the musical vocabulary they expressed in own their time.

…..Many musicians and fans have asked Akinmusire about what they perceive as his innovative extended instrumental techniques he performs during his trumpet improvisations. Yet he does not want to be seen as an innovative iconoclast. His trumpet sound is not about his ability to innovate but reveals his deep investigation into the repository of improvised language that reflects lives formed in the interiority of a Black musical space.

…..His composition “The Lingering Velocity of the Dead’s Ambitions,” which closes Origami Harvest, is as much about his channeling the spirits of the improvisation masters as it is about honoring the Black men and women murdered through the legalized implements of structural racism. The term “lingering velocity” seems like an oxymoron on its face: “lingering” implies staying in place; “velocity” is about speed of motion in a particular direction. Consistent with his not feeling any duty to reconcile seemingly unrelated themes, Akinmusire juxtaposes these two signifiers to define spirits of past masters suspended with him in space, yet moving in a circulatory direction that inspires what Henry Threadgill called “spontaneous and extemporaneous” improvisation.

…..Akinmusire also believes the ambitions of the dead are not buried with the ancestors but remain alive, waiting to be fulfilled by those still living. The “Lingering Velocity” section of the Origami Harvest trailer shows cinematographic evidence of Akinmusire’s Black thought: blurred images of the ancestors of improvisation hanging on the wall of the Village Vanguard (4:41, 5:09), photos and posters of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and others that most viewers would be unable to decipher in the blurriness of that liminal space.

…..Those hanging images constitute a shrine toward which Akinmusire points his bell in reverence. The bell of his trumpet represents his hands clasped in humility, praise, and gratitude. Akinmusire does not worship the masters, but his music is a perpetual prayer in dialogue with their legacy and living artistic ambitions—ambitions suspended in that Black sense of place-lessness, awaiting those open enough to feel them and technically prepared enough to articulate them through musical instruments. Akinmusire focuses not on being an innovator but on his commitment to connecting his work to his improvisation ancestors:

…..If there is anything I pride myself in, it is my knowledge of the history of this music. And so it is very easy for me to imagine, in a very tangible way, what Booker Little would have sounded like at thirty, at forty, at fifty, at sixty; same thing with Clifford Brown, same thing with Lee Morgan, same thing with someone like Henry Red Allen—who to me, was a master of extended techniques. It’s easy for me to imagine what Don Cherry would sound like if he sat down and had a classical teacher for five years, and all this stuff was executed poorly. I’m trying to be a conduit for all of those spirits to live through me; to play through me in a straight-up, real way. I’m trying to get rid of myself enough for them to come inside me and express the things they are not able to express in this physical world. A lot of people ask me about innovation or doing things that may be new. Maybe I am, but it’s really through them. Because, if we’re being straight up, I don’t sit down and practice that stuff. I’m listening to my peers, and I’ll get their music to see what is going on today. But I’m listening to the masters and how they expressed their time. That’s the beautiful thing about the masters: they will meet you where you are at. You can always return to it and hear completely other shit. These recordings are alive, and I know that they knew the music was alive.

…..Notably, in the list of trumpet players whom Akinmusire cites, Allen and Cherry are the only ones who lived past the age of forty (each approached sixty); Little died at twenty-three, Brown twenty-five, and Morgan thirty-three.

Melodic Conception and Akinmusire’s Internal Ear

…..Akinmusire’s melodic conception is related to his exploration of what he calls his “internal ear”:

…..To exercise the internal ear is to play exactly what the music wants. The better you can do that, the more in line you will be with terms like “innovation.” I also think the music is living but not in some type of hokey or hippie way. The only thing is, we can’t see it. We can feel it and it changes you; sometimes you can even smell it.

…..In this intervallic analysis, I study Akinmusire’s melodic conception in his improvisation on “Confessions,” seeking to understand how he crosses bar lines and produces space in musical performance during his melodic experimentation. In the first four phrases of his trumpet solo at 4:41 in “Confessions,” Akinmusire plays unconventional wide intervals that signify his conception of musical space and intervallic exploration. While his exploration is facilitated by a limited harmonic framework that mostly centers on E minor, there is no harmonic stasis represented in his ideas. Through the performance of complex intervals, Akinmusire superimposes harmonies that expand the ways E minor can be heard through different sonic prisms. Yet he does not play modally. For example, the first notes he plays are B–G–D, comprising intervals of a minor sixth and a perfect fifth. The second phrase he performs, A–F#–D, is major sixth to minor sixth, and the third intervallic configuration he performs is G–F# –B, which is a major seventh to minor sixth. The fourth phrase is A–G–F# :

Musical example 4.2. Akinmusire’s unconventional wide-interval phrases 1–4 at 4:41.

…..Akinmusire’s permutations of spacious intervals suggest risk and the celebration of the intangibility of Black musical space. More importantly, these intervallic configurations convey a departure from conventional forms of melodic improvising. The significance of this very untraditional way of improvising is found in the ascending intervallic permutations. In phrase 6, Akinmusire departs from the three-note, wide-interval motif. This first such departure is in the ascending interval from A below to D above high C at 4:58—a span of nineteen notes:

Musical example 4.3. Akinmusire’s performed interval in phrase 6 of A–D at 4:58. This interval of a nineteenth is a departure from the three-note motif.

…..His played D ascends more than two octaves. At this juncture, this is the shortest phrase and the longest interval in his improvisation. However, beginning with phrase 7 at 5:01, a pattern begins with phrases that pivot off of two notes. The next several phrases show how Akinmusire’s melodic ideas are well thought out and consistent.

…..In phrases 7–13, Akinmusire plays motivic and varied ideas that pivot off notes D and E. Interval-wise, these phrases are more compact. Whereas the earlier improvised phrases only ascended, his melodic phrases now have both ascending and descending patterns:

Musical example 4.4. Phrases 7–13: examples of Akinmusire’s motivic ideas beginning at 5:00.

…..Phrase 7 begins at 5:00 with D–E, a major second that rises a perfect fifth from E–B and descends a major second to A. These are more “vocal” phrases with clear melodic patterns. Phrase 8 repeats the permutation in phrase 7, to establish the melodic and rhythmic motif. In phrase 9, Akinmusire begins the first variation on phrase 7’s permutation by playing D–E–A–Bb–A, then descending to A–G. The Bb–A are grace notes or decorative flourishes. The difference here is that Bb is flattened and a G is added to the phrase. In phrase 10, Akinmusire ends his phrase in a different direction: he plays D–E–Bb –C and approaches D chromatically through D . This is the first time since phrase 6 that his phrase ends in ascending motion.

…..Akinmusire’s phrase 12 is a reverse permutation of notes through octave displacement. The phrase begins on the pivot notes D and E, which ascend an octave but are performed in reverse order. Akinmusire’s gesture of octave displacement foreshadows what he will perform later in the solo.

…..For the majority of his solo, Akinmusire exploits two registers of his trumpet. At phrase 13, when he pivots thematically on D and E, Akinmusire suggests bitonality by performing notes that are not traditionally within the scale of E minor. For example, he plays Bb–C–Bb–A, all note colors that indicate a different harmonic area. This thematic variation on what he played six phrases earlier prefigures his movement into the contrasting B section, which oscillates through the harmonic pendulum of C major and E major chords.

Analyzing Contrasting B Section

…..The contrasting B section, which enters at phrase 14, moves from C major to E major by way of a D major chord. Akinmusire’s improvisation, characterized mostly by highly chromatic “out notes” so far, harmonically adjusts to phrase 14 when Akinmusire plays A–Bb –A–G. Akinmusire’s melodic phrase begins in the lower range and then lingers in the midrange of his trumpet. Phrase 14 also appears to be a variation on phrase 9.

…..Whereas phrase 9 pivots on D and E, phrase 14 begins on G and A; however, the latter half of the phrase echoes phrase 9 in the melodic contour of Ab–A–G. Phrase 15, at twenty-one notes, is the longest in Akinmusire’s improvisation at this juncture: it threads through the two major chords of C major and E major, which oscillate like a pendulum of bright colors compared to the dirge quality of the E minor performance in the A section, where it was the illusion of harmonic stasis that created an opportunity for Akinmusire and saxophonist Walter Smith III to play modal harmonicpoint while implying other modes. I avoid the Western signifier counterpoint because Akinmusire and Smith create spatial harmony through their interweaving melodic lines instead of countering each other. Except for perfect octave leaps and intervals of perfect fifth, Akinmusire’s phrase is mostly composed of major second and minor second intervals, emphasizing chromaticism in the melodic line over the course of this long phrase. Moreover, phrase 15 is not fragmented, unlike most phrases in the beginning of his improvisation in the A section.

…..While it illuminates C major and E major chords, phrase 16, composed of ten notes, occurs only over the C major chord. Akinmusire reintroduces phrases split between two distinct registers after the B section. As noted above, his oscillation between two registers adds a unique character to the shape and sound of his improvised lines. He suggests bitonality in the A section and improvises more within the chord changes on the B section.

…..In phrase 17 Akinmusire plays “unconventional” notes in the mid to high and low range of his trumpet over E major and C major chords. Akinmusire’s musical phrase sounds momentarily discontinuous but connects in one breath that crosses the literal bar lines. I contend that Akinmusire’s performance of two registers of his trumpet represents a two-voice-out-of-one double consciousness.

Musical example 4.5. Phrase 17 at 5:23 shows how Akinmusire plays an idea that is a double-voiced, timbral exploration of the high and low of registers of his trumpet over E major and C major chords.

…..Akinmusire exploits the full range of the instrument with melodic invention in two registers successively while maintaining a vocal timbre. His improvisational approach disavows codified styles of improvisation, and his melodic ideas may be displaced by one or more octaves. In this improvisation, Akinmusire never relies on diatonic melodies performed within an octave. Further evidence of this representation by Akinmusire of double con-sciousness is that his registral gestures are repeated again in phrase 18. Whereas the seven-note phrase of G–F–E–F–G–Ab –A is performed in the high register of the trumpet, followed by a leap down an octave to A in phrase 19, the majority of the phrase, including the notes of Ab –G–Bb –G–A –D, is in the lower register.

…..Most of Akinmusire’s registral leaps are separated into phrases. Continuing the strategy of performing in two registers, Akinmusire performs phrase 20, which shoots into the upper register again. The shorter phrase 21 is a continuation of the idea in phrase 20 but performed in the lower register. Akinmusire not only jumps between the low and high registers of his trumpet but also varies his musical statements between longer and shorter phrases. Again, most of his fragmented harmonic exploration occurs within the E minor non-progression of the A section, whereas longer, poetic melodic lines are performed over major chords in the contrasting B section.

…..Phrase 22 demonstrates a shorter four-note melodic idea in the upper register. Akinmusire performs a constellation of notes that are highly chro-matic pitch sets. Here, for example, he plays the four-note series A–Ab–G–A:

Musical example 4.6. Chromatic cell idea in this entire phrase 22. This is a continuation of the four-note permutation idea.

…..Phrase 22 is a four-note permutation as in phrases 8, 12, and 17. While there is much chromaticism in the varied melodic lines, these four-note permutations are connected in that no wide intervallic leaps are used. The first chorus, sixteen-note phrase 23, which includes several ghost notes, is the next-longest phrase after phrase 15. This phrase itself indicates that Akinmusire often thinks in smaller pitch sets as he improvises in this performance, but those smaller pitch sets often spin out into longer phrases. The series of improvised permutations in lower register phrase 23 is the first line with two intervals of tritones, Bb –E and Ab –D, lending them a momentary emphasis. The nine-note phrase 24, in contrast, occurs in the upper range of the trumpet. Phrase 25 is highly chromatic, with a large number of major seconds and minor seconds, and is performed in the lower range.

…..Phrase 26 marks a departure from Akinmusire’s earlier melodic constructions; here Akinmusire begins to signal the end of one cycle of improvisation by playing a partial flatted fifth, a Bb over the E minor blues figure in the beginning of the phrase. The actual ending of Akinmusire’s solo is demarcated by phrase 27, a one-note phrase of F# played on a half-valved pitch. This half-valved F# signals a new improvisation cycle because, in addition to the previous altered blues figure and the musical space that follows the note F# , Akinmusire then returns to the earlier idea of the wide-interval motif. This musical gesture of return shows that he is closing the narrative.

…..In this thirty-one-phrase improvisation, what distinguishes this new performance of wide-interval motifs in phrase 28 is that Akinmusire plays them within this one phrase, not in distinct, separate phrases as they were in the beginning of the solo. Phrase 28 contains two sets of ascending intervals. The first five-note pitch set in this phrase comprises C–E followed by the three-note E–F# –G. This is followed by a four-note passage: D moving a half step to E , followed by a perfect fifth to Bb , and then ascending, in slight vibrato, to A, a major seventh, to end phrase 28:

Musical example 4.7. Akinmusire returns to improvising wide intervals in this partial example of phrase 28.

…..The musical data from Akinmusire’s solo reveals high-pitched growls and the splitting of melodic lines into two registers as strategies of musical resistance to codified constructs of improvisation. Akinmusire’s improvisation represents spatial musical values on the outskirts of universal notions of musical beauty, agency, and humanity. His music is Black expression but not burdened with the rules and norms of what critics say Black expression should be. Akinmusire’s unconventional musical gestures represent his immersion in Black musical space and time beyond any organizing epistemology of Blackness that seeks to confine Black expression to a limiting, discursive formation.

…..Akinmusire argues that the codification of improvised music language is a ruse designed to make students think Black musical culture can be apprehended—a verb that conveys not only “grasped with the understanding” but also “arrested, seized”: “I live jazz; you can’t take that away from me. If we have a whole community who understands that it’s here [points to his heart], you can’t take that away from us. That’s the way it was with the beboppers, before jazz education came and made it this tangible thing and a lot of people started believing it.” Akinmusire believes, then, that the institutionalization of Black jazz culture has created a pedagogical jazz education culture based on the illusion of tangible Blackness. In his view, this tangible product of “jazz education” is dispersed so well among idealistic jazz students that some African American improvisers outside the conservatory begin to perceive that white cultural appropriation of their Black musical codes is tantamount to having their music being completely co-opted.

…..Akinmusire believes that if Black musicians understood that Black music culture is not a product to be bought, sold, or downloaded but is in the heart, and in the consistent, disciplined performance of that Black culture, then the argument of white cultural appropriation falls by the wayside. This understanding would uphold Black music culture as fluid, vast, unpredictable, and unable to be apprehended. Akinmusire’s fight against the codification and concretization of Black music culture is seen in his rejection both of traditional methods of improvisation and of traditional hierarchy in his ensemble. Akinmusire plays music from that Black sense of space, music that may seem iconoclastic to conservative ears but is rooted in a kind of Black musical geography.

…..The space he puts between his notes represents the rejection of such tangibility as the musical figures in the tropology of clichés that fill jazz methodology books. The solution, in Akinmusire’s view, is not to be distracted by the jazz product but to understand that culture is somehow internal to the glistening heart. This is the story that Akinmusire tells through his words and improvisation. It’s a story of human complexity that articulates the day-to-day experience of Blackness as well as the Blackness that we may never know. The complex personhood embodied in Akinmusire’s improvisation resides in his intention to resist ideas of music held up as tradition.

…..Akinmusire’s narrativity is focused on a place beyond tradition. His music reminds us that African American musicians create stories that reveal how they view themselves in relation to a larger society that does not view them as equal. His compositional and improvisational practices are important for what they say about Black life operating in a sphere outside civil society. Akinmusire’s techniques connect with the “traditional mission in blues history,” described as “reasserting the blues idiom by critically boxing with it and evading attempts at formal standardization, as the old blues people and their jazz descendants and contemporaries had done.” Akinmusire’s music clearly engages with that mission of evading standardization, crossing bar lines as he explores the contours of his imagination and while musically mapping radical Black musical space.

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James Gordon Williams is a composer, pianist, and cultural theorist whose work bridges music, Black studies, and performance. He is the author of Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space (2021). Williams has performed and collaborated with Terri Lyne Carrington, Anthony Davis, Mark Dresser, Joseph Jarman, Gregory Porter, and George E. Lewis. He has appeared at Birdland, Village Vanguard, and festivals in France, Italy, and Malta. His new album, Falling to Rise Again, will be released this year. He is Associate Professor of Composition at University of California, Santa Cruz.

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