With black ink sweat-smudged on back-of-hand skin, five hundred people enter a college lecture hall in Cologne. The stamped logos confirm permission to attend the German city’s Jazz Week. It’s the first day of September. Outside, the temperature is 32 degrees Celsius. Inside, dense clouds of theatrical fog absorb blue light from overhead – but cannot mask the musk of sunblocked arms or flip-flopped feet.
When the light softens, four figures march into the low-hanging mist. Ambrose Akinmusire stands front-and-centre with his trumpet. At a grand piano to his left, Sam Harris hunches with his back turned to the full-house crowd. Harish Raghavan hugs a double bass in the background, while Justin Brown settles behind a compact drumkit.
A few seconds later, Akinmusire penetrates the murk with fizzing low-tone calls that saturate the auditorium. He is a sound-driven player, more focused on how his instrument speaks than how many notes it can spit out or how quickly. At this show, several songs began in the same way: The American trumpeter flooding the sonic space before his colleagues joined in.
All four bandmates wore head-to-toe black, except Brown. His lime-green shoes and grey-chequered golf socks stood out. His playing was untypical too. The group shared a preference for a less-is-more style but the drummer was expansive and busy. On his scaled-down setup, he rattled the rims and stands and other hardware with limitless energy and invention.
Akinmusire and Harris got several opportunities to stretch out, but tended to boil things down instead. Both players used the spotlight to examine narrower sections of material, rather than exploring intricate or complex possibilities. The pianist’s hands rarely ventured more than two octaves apart, for example. He found plenty of meaning within close reach.
The set’s final song was perhaps its most memorable. As the night’s heaviest belch of smog enveloped the band, Akinmusire and Raghavan installed an on-the-beat pulse of a single note – and clung to it for several minutes. Harris called chords through the gloom. The band’s percussionist, meanwhile, rampaged in every direction. The response? Ink-smudged hands slapping for a standing ovation.
This group has substantial experience of collaborating in studio and live settings. Despite the billowing stage smoke, that much was crystal clear to the perspiring public. Akinmusire is a calculating, captivating artist and his quartet swept into the heat-hazy city with freshness and clarity. On the last truly hot day of summer, it was very cool.
Cologne Jazz Week, held for the fourth time, took place from 31 August to 7 September 2024. It featured artists from around the world across 15 stages throughout the city. In 2023, it won recognition as “Festival of the Year” from the German Jazz Prize. More info here.
