Ambrose Akinmusire : Honey From a Winter Stone
Ambrose Akinmusire has undergone a transformation. Where before his work seemed divided in its intent, assembling in the whole but dissolving on the order of pieces, on his latest album Honey From a Winter Stone, those former disparate elements are woven into suites of increasing length. Ruminative rolls of romantic piano arpeggios play against the ghost-like drift of phantasmal trumpet and singular piano notes. Bass and drums lock together into hip-hop grooves abetted this time by a rapper who seems deliberately to be evoking a young Kendrick Lamar, back when he still guested on Drake records he was writing raps for, focusing on his youthful agile alacrity. Synths rise in humming beds of drone, painting the bleak angularity and dark color of fascist architecture brooding in dense fog and sulfuric rain. Strings braid around one another in knot-like chamber music that reads like the straining of light within the bare cell of a cloistered monk, sequestered in the dungeons below the church.
It is not enough to say that this record extends deepest of all his work yet the cinematic heft of this kind of polyformal composition. These pieces achieve the kind of rhapsodic intensity that Miles Davis did on Sketches of Spain, feeling almost like something that has always been, field recordings of an older world that has existed just outside of view. Blackness soaks the record. Not in a didactic way. It’s hard not to think of Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, of James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe. There is architecture here as sophisticated as any running contemporary classic composer, a field I find myself drawn to more and more as a vista of potent imagination as heavy metal seems to be stumbling for me at the moment. But, just like the multi-genre greats currently dominating the contemporary classical space, Akinmusire is happy to disrupt these fine constructions of crystal and line, angle and prism, with the wild color and West African-modeled drum patterns that have been a staple of the jazz world since its inception.
The result is a work that feels like a collision of time, eras like continents converging in slow dreamlike motion toward the same subducting faultine, consumer of time. “MYanx.”, the center track of the five, plays with the off-time synth hits like a jazz oriented approach to djent, over top the rapping vocalist does what any great jazz player does: enjoins. These are not verses that seize the center stage. It feels the way stream of conscious thoughts unwind haphazardly to the intoxicating drift of great cloudlike jazz, a fascinating meta turn where it feels briefly like we are listening to someone listening to the record rather than just the record itself. The way quite out piano chordal lines and tempo-agnostic strings weave a tenebrous air to the otherwise husky and dim groove establishes the wavering dream of emotional space that the later isolated pizzicato and sawed strings lace with a quiet anxiety.
The most apt single condensation of the compositional approach of this record would be all of a mind at once. You can see the outside world, the body, the anxiety and the floating balloon of imagination all occurring in simultaneity, instruments as cast in the dramatis personae of jazz-cum-psychodrama. Nowhere is this more apt than the final piece, the colossal 30-minute “s-/Kinfolks”. It is a suite that plays like a second album in miniature, a sequence of loosely connected ideas that burst out of each other’s Jovian skulls after the Hephaestion blow of their spontaneous generation. There are moments of abstract colorwork and moments of clear driven songcraft, moments of careful and delicate construction and moments of ambient watercolor Vaseline smears of thought.
Most importantly it, like the other tracks of this record, don’t privilege one mode over another. You never get the sense that contemporary jazz is the focus with classical music and synth work and hip-hop as accoutrements, or any other wheel spin of that sentence construction. Honey From a Winter Stone, like a human soul, contains not just the capacity of multitudinous simultaneity but its inherency. Akinmusire is too smart to be so arrogant as to make music about answering questions of social disorder. Instead, this is a portrait of heart and mind observant of those woes, feeling, fixated, and rapt within the counter tides of dissociative force crashing against the dark stone of consciousness.
Label: Nonesuch
Year: 2025
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