I’ve spent forty years at KBEM, and I’ve learned to hear the difference between a record about something and a record made from something. A memorial concert is about grief. A standard that gets recorded as a tribute is about memory. But there’s another category—rarer, harder to make—where the actual texture of living through catastrophe changes what a musician can play and how they play it.
Ambrose Akinmusire’s honey from a winter stone (Nonesuch Records, 2025) is that second kind of record. He made it while his mother was dying in Oakland, and in the weeks after her death. He didn’t write around the loss. He brought it into the sessions, into the collaborations, into the exact shape his sound would take every morning when he picked up the trumpet. What emerged is one of the most unsparing records I’ve heard from a working jazz musician—devastation that doesn’t ask for consolation, precision that doesn’t need to prove itself.
Context Before Sound
If you know Akinmusire’s recent work, you understand how much ground he’s covered in three years. Beauty Is Enough (Nonesuch, 2023) was forty-eight minutes of solo trumpet—nothing else, nowhere to hide. Then Owl Song (Nonesuch, 2024), a trio with Bill Frisell and Herlin Riley that sounded like three musicians who’d agreed to play only what was necessary. Both records were heard widely and praised seriously. Both could have been followed with something more demonstrative—bigger ensemble, more voices, more conventional resolution.
He went the other direction.
What He’s Built
Akinmusire brings in Kokayi on wordless improvised vocals, Sam Harris on piano, a string quartet, and additional collaborators. The instrumentation is denser than his recent output but operates under the same principle: nothing extra, nothing decorative. The weight of the strings corresponds to something actual—not sentiment but pressure, the kind of emotional gravity that melody alone can’t carry.
What’s instructive here is that Akinmusire didn’t abandon the restraint he’d developed. He scaled it. The ensemble serves the emotional material rather than competing with it. Every voice on this record sounds like it was chosen for this specific grief, not for general versatility.
The Timeline
Akinmusire has mentioned that the Alonzo King Lines Ballet was developing new work during the same period he was in the studio. King’s entire practice rests on the idea that actual life—loss, confusion, joy—isn’t an obstacle to the work; it’s the material. Being in proximity to that approach shifted something in what Akinmusire brought to these sessions.
He also trained at Manhattan School of Music, won the Thelonious Monk Competition in 2007, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow. That biography matters not because it makes him credible—he doesn’t need credentials—but because it means he chose to make this music from a position of technical and professional security. He didn’t have to. He could have released another solo album or waited. Instead, he made something that meets grief directly.
The Trumpet and the Work
I want to talk specifically about what a trumpet demands, because Akinmusire has been direct about this in interviews, and it matters to what you hear on this record.
The trumpet will not let you fake it. The first casualty of missed practice isn’t your technique or your range—it’s your sound. That specific, identifiable quality of tone that distinguishes a serious player from a technician. You cannot recover it from muscle memory. You rebuild it every morning from the ground up, or it isn’t there.
On honey from a winter stone, Akinmusire’s tone carries a clarity that doesn’t feel cold. It’s restrained in a way that sounds chosen rather than imposed—the quality Miles Davis had on his great ballad recordings, where the space between notes becomes its own statement rather than emptiness. Akinmusire has thought about Miles his entire career, not as a model to copy but as proof that sounding exactly like yourself is the hardest permission to earn and the most valuable to keep.
The Precision of Sorrow
What strikes me across repeated listens is how much the technical control increases the emotional impact rather than diminishing it. This isn’t a record where emotion is purchased through looseness or rawness. Akinmusire’s intonation is exact. The vibrato is precise. The architecture of each phrase is deliberate. That exactitude makes the feeling land harder, because there’s nowhere for it to hide.
That’s a mature move. A younger musician might reach for distortion or a broken sound to convey pain. Akinmusire is confident enough—or maybe devastated enough—to let clarity do the work.
The Ensemble and the Voice
Kokayi’s vocal contributions represent one of the record’s central choices. He doesn’t sing words or carry melody in any conventional sense. He improvises in what I’d call wordless expressionism—he responds to Akinmusire’s trumpet the way another horn player might, but through the human voice. It creates the effect of two musicians in conversation about something that language can’t quite reach.
Sam Harris on piano is similarly oblique. He’s there to support, not to decorate or fill space. Every phrase he plays seems to be asking a question rather than making a statement. It’s collaborative listening made audible.
| Personnel | Instrument | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Ambrose Akinmusire | Trumpet | Composer, primary voice |
| Kokayi | Improvised vocals | Call-and-response partner |
| Sam Harris | Piano | Harmonic support |
| String quartet | Violin, viola, cello | Structural weight |
The string arrangements deserve their own sentence. They don’t sweeten anything. They add gravity—the sense that real weight is being borne. A string quartet in a jazz context can easily become orchestral scenery. These strings are working, active, often in counterpoint with Akinmusire rather than supporting him.
What This Record Accomplishes
When a working musician has access to resources—a label, a team, the technical apparatus of professional recording—they can make something difficult or something accessible. Akinmusire made something that is neither inaccessible nor easy.
“Grief at this level of musical intelligence—grief made precise, grief that doesn’t console itself with prettiness or resolution—is rare.” — Genaro Vasquez, KBEM
The emotional range available to jazz extends into territory most contemporary music doesn’t visit, but only when a musician is willing to use all of it. Akinmusire is willing. He’s four years into the period of work that began with The Imagined Savior Appears in the Cartography of Clouds (2021), and the productivity is matched by depth. Each album has taught him something that becomes material for the next one.
At a moment when jazz discourse often gets trapped in questions of audience and accessibility, he’s making records that ask something from listeners and give something extraordinary in return.
The Record in Context
honey from a winter stone appeared in the same year as significant new work from Mary Halvorson, Melissa Aldana, and Tomeka Reid — a sustained period of serious output from musicians who came up together through New York’s improvised music community in the 2010s. That cohort has consistently produced work that resists easy categorization, and Akinmusire’s album is among its most accomplished examples.
Nonesuch Records — home to Bill Frisell, Pat Metheny, and the earlier Akinmusire records — gave him the space to make something quiet and unhurried. That institutional support matters more than it looks. A record this emotionally specific, this resistant to conventional jazz marketing, needs a label willing to let it find its audience over time rather than through immediate commercial pressure. Nonesuch has that patience. The record exists partly because of that.
Akinmusire has spoken in interviews about the album’s title coming from a line of poetry — the idea that what seems hard and cold can yield something sustaining. It’s an apt frame for what the music does. The sessions were made under grief’s weight, but they didn’t produce music that sounds defeated. They produced music that sounds clear — the clarity that sometimes comes after the worst thing happens and you understand, finally, exactly what matters.
honey from a winter stone is available on vinyl and digital formats.
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