AMBROSE AKINMUSIRE “Honey from a Winter Stone”

ARTIST

Ambrose Akinmusire

ALBUM TITLE

“Honey from a Winter Stone”

LABEL

Nonesuch

______________________________________________________________

Akinmusire’s trumpet, underscored by the melancholic filigree of Sam Harris’s piano, introduces Muffles Scream—a track that envelopes the listener in meditative tension before erupting with Justin Brown’s drums and Kokayi’s visceral rap. So begins one of the most emotionally resonant albums of recent memory.

Long past are the days when Akinmusire’s music could be reduced to technique or virtuosity alone. He composes and performs as if tracing the contours of lived experience—complex, raw, and unsentimental. Honey from a Winter Stone is modern music in the truest sense: a convergence of jazz, classical form, and the defiant pulse of hip-hop, forming a soundscape steeped in the African-American experience.

Pieces like Bloomed (The Ongoing Processional of Nighas in the Hoodies) and Myanx fuse the trumpet’s searing edge with Kokayi’s charged texts and the chamber tension of the Mivos Quartet. But it is S- /Kinfolks, a nearly thirty-minute epic, that confirms Akinmusire’s singular vision. This is not simply music—it is architecture, landscape, and elegy all at once. Listening to it is to be moved, intellectually and viscerally.

This is an uncompromising and urgent record, one that challenges genre and summons comparison with Coltrane—not in sound, but in spiritual ambition. Akinmusire stands now among the great artist-prophets of our time.

—Nicola Gaeta

DISTRIBUTED BY

nonesuch.com

LINEUP