AMBROSE AKINMUSIRE’S ORIGAMI HARVEST
With a string quartet and an MC in tow, the trumpeter’s new outfit is an unusual configuration that perhaps is still finding its balance. But flashes of brilliance continually blasted through their Sunday presentation, and many of them had to do with the variety of sounds created by his instrument as well as the textures that emerged when he, pianist Sam Harris, and drummer Marcus Gilmore swooped through and played off the hefty counterpoints scripted for the Mivos Quartet. Akinmusire flaunts a poet’s heart and dodges the obvious at all costs, so Kool A.D.’s narrations weren’t always rap bars in the trad sense, but vivid sketches of modern predicaments and uncomfortable truths that warranted an artistic sorting-out. You know, lives being lived in the here and now.
