On a morning in early 2025, Ambrose Akinmusire — born in 1982 in Oakland, California, a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, a two-time winner of the [Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition](https://monkinstitute.org/) (2007) — sent a text to another trumpet player asking about a specific tonguing technique he’d been working on. This is, apparently, how Akinmusire starts most mornings — sharing technical problems, seeking solutions, refusing to treat the instrument as something he has already figured out.
“I’m up every morning sharing technical stuff, trying to address that part,” he has said. “I’m on the phone with other trumpet players.” He paused, then named the reason: “I figured that a guy like Clark Terry was practicing up until the end. Woody Shaw. These guys did it. Who the hell am I to be taking breaks?”
At this point in his career, Akinmusire has the biography to prove his seriousness — Thelonious Monk Competition winner, multiple DownBeat Trumpet of the Year titles, a discography that runs from his Blue Note debut through collaborations with Bill Frisell to his recent work with the Alonzo King Lines Ballet. He has scored a television series, composed for ballet companies in Hamburg and San Francisco, and released three albums in two years including the widely praised honey from a winter stone. None of it has made him less obsessive about the fundamentals.
Jazz Diggs: You’ve talked about Miles Davis in terms of permission rather than vocabulary. What do you mean?
The thing that matters about Miles isn’t the harmon mute or the specific notes — every trumpet player who ever listened to him has absorbed those things. What matters is the fact that he sounded like no one else at every stage of his career. Birth of the Cool sounds nothing like Kind of Blue. Kind of Blue sounds nothing like In a Silent Way. And none of those sound like On the Corner.
That restlessness — that willingness to destroy what you’ve built and start over — that’s the actual lesson. Not the tone. The permission to keep moving.
“If your heart is in the right place,” I’ve always believed, “the audience will always come with you.” Miles proved that. He lost audiences multiple times. He didn’t care.
You won the Monk Competition in 2007. How did that change things?
It opened doors, but more than that it put me in a community. The Monk Competition puts you in a room with the people who care most seriously about this music. Herbie Hancock was there. Wayne Shorter came through. These were people I’d been listening to my entire life, and suddenly I was being evaluated by them.
It’s a different kind of pressure. It’s not the pressure of, am I good enough? It’s the pressure of: am I being honest? Are these choices actually mine? That question — whether your choices are actually yours — is the one I’ve been answering my whole career.
Your recent work has moved increasingly into collaboration with dance and visual art. Why?
Because the music asks for it. When I’m composing for a dance piece, I’m responding to bodies moving in space, to the specific gravity of human movement. That changes what I write. It pulls me away from the habits I’d develop if I was only writing for an audience sitting in seats.
The Alonzo King collaboration was particularly meaningful because it happened while I was grieving — my mother passed during that period. King’s whole practice is about engaging with real life situations as artistic material. Being around someone who approaches loss, grief, and difficulty as the actual subject of the work, not something to be managed or set aside — that was profound.
When I brought that experience back to the trumpet, something had changed. The sound had more of that in it.
You’ve described the trumpet as an unforgiving instrument. What does that mean for a player at your level?
It means there’s no coasting. The first thing to go, if you stop practicing, is your sound. Not your technique, not your range — your sound. And from the first few notes of a trumpet player, you can tell how serious they are. You can tell if they’ve been practicing. The instrument tells the truth before you’ve played a single melody.
I love that about it. I like that it weeds out people who aren’t that serious. You can’t casually play trumpet and get away with it. Some instruments allow you to hide for a while. The trumpet doesn’t. And that’s exactly what Miles understood — not as a limitation but as the whole point. You can’t fake the sound. You have to earn it, every single morning, or it’s gone.
Miles kept changing his sound even when critics and audiences wanted him to stay the same. How do you think about that relationship between artist and audience?
He had contempt for the idea that success meant doing the same thing again. He said once — and I’m paraphrasing — that he didn’t understand why musicians would want to go back and play music they’d already figured out. What’s the point? You’ve already solved that problem.
For me, every album is a response to a question I couldn’t answer on the last one. Honey from a winter stone was a response to questions that Owl Song raised. What is music that is genuinely made out of grief? Not music that represents grief, but music that is actually made from the inside of it? That’s what I was trying to find out.
I don’t know if I found the answer. But I know I’m asking the right question.
Ambrose Akinmusire’s most recent album, honey from a winter stone*, is available now. He performs internationally throughout 2026.*
