There is a difference between music that is about grief and music that is made from grief. Akinmusire, born in 1982 in Oakland, trained at the Manhattan School of Music, a two-time winner of the Thelonious Monk Competition (2007), a Guggenheim Fellow, understands the difference. The first kind — elegies, tributes, memorial concerts — is organized around loss as a subject. The second kind is harder to define and rarer to encounter: music in which the emotional reality of living through something has actually altered what the musician plays and how they play it.
Ambrose Akinmusire’s honey from a winter stone (2024, Nonesuch Records) is the second kind. It was made while his mother, a nurse in Oakland, California, was dying and in the immediate aftermath of her death. He did not write around this. He brought it into the studio, into the collaborations, into the specific quality of sound that a trumpet player must rebuild every single morning from the ground up.
The result is emotionally devastating and technically exact — two qualities that rarely appear in the same record.
The Album
Honey from a winter stone follows two records that would have been daunting to top: Beauty Is Enough (2023, Nonesuch Records), forty-eight minutes of solo trumpet with nothing else, and Owl Song (2024, Nonesuch Records), a trio album with guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Herlin Riley that sounded like three people deciding, collectively, to play only what was necessary. Both records were widely praised. Both would have been easy to follow with something louder, more populated, more conventionally demonstrative.
Instead, Akinmusire assembled a group that includes vocalist Kokayi, pianist Sam Harris, a string quartet, and additional contributors — a sound that is larger than his recent work but no less restrained. The density serves the grief rather than obscuring it. The strings create a weight that corresponds to something, an emotional pressure that plain melody wouldn’t carry.
The album has been described as echoing Miles Davis’s innovation alongside Lonnie Holley’s soulful avant-garde — two reference points that are, characteristically for Akinmusire, both apt and insufficient. The music sounds like itself. It sounds like a man who has been practicing every morning for his whole life, who lost the person who first made music possible for him, and who went into the studio anyway because that’s the only thing he knows how to do with the hard parts.
The Trumpet
To understand what Akinmusire is doing on this record requires some understanding of what the trumpet actually demands. He has been direct about this: the trumpet is an instrument that shows you immediately whether you’ve been practicing. The first thing to go is your sound — not technique, not range, but the specific quality of tone that identifies a serious player in the first three notes. You cannot fake it. You cannot coast on reputation. Every morning you start over.
On honey from a winter stone, Akinmusire’s sound has a quality that’s difficult to name precisely. It is clear without being cold. It is restrained in a way that sounds like restraint chosen rather than restraint imposed — the same quality that Miles Davis had on his greatest ballad recordings, where the space between the notes was not emptiness but a different kind of statement. Akinmusire has been thinking about Miles for his entire career, not as a model to emulate but as evidence that the permission to sound exactly like yourself is the hardest thing to earn and the most valuable thing to keep.
The Collaboration
The Alonzo King Lines Ballet was developing a new piece at the same time Akinmusire was making this record, and the two projects were in conversation. King’s practice is built around the idea that real-life situations — grief, loss, joy, confusion — are the actual material of art, not obstacles to it. Being around someone who worked that way, Akinmusire has said, changed what he brought to the studio.
The Kokayi vocal contributions are unlike conventional jazz vocals — he improvises in a mode closer to wordless expressionism, responding to the trumpet rather than carrying a melody. The effect is of two voices in conversation about something that can’t quite be said, which is exactly right for the subject matter.
Harris’s piano is similarly oblique, supportive without being decorative. The string quartet adds gravity without adding weight in the wrong places. The ensemble is well-calibrated in the way that Akinmusire’s best groups always are: every member sounds like they were chosen specifically for this music, for this moment.
What It Proves
Honey from a winter stone proves something that should be obvious but keeps needing demonstration: that the emotional range available to jazz, when a musician is willing to use all of it, extends to territory most contemporary music doesn’t visit. Grief at this level of musical intelligence — grief made precise, grief that doesn’t console itself with prettiness or resolution — is rare.
Akinmusire is three albums deep into a period of remarkable productivity and even more remarkable depth. At a moment when the conversation about jazz often gets stuck on questions of accessibility and audience, he is making records that are neither inaccessible nor easy, records that ask something of the listener and give something extraordinary in return.
His mother would have heard this album. There is something in the sound that suggests he knows she is still listening.
honey from a winter stone is available now on vinyl and digital formats.
