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Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet), performing in front of Trace Me Back by Marie Bannerot McInerney (featuring drone by Bill Reiter), published 8/13/26

Ambrose Akinmusire:

The title, Trace Me Back, made me think about my first experience with creative improvised music: seeing the Art Ensemble of Chicago at the original Yoshi’s. At the same time, the material in the piece reminded me of that white lab coat Lester Bowie wore. The title and the material were both taking me back in time, just in different ways.

The hanging forms started to feel like marks on a chronological graph. Each one held a different stretch of time, a different era or version of myself. As I moved back and forth through the space, I was moving through my influences, experiences with my heroes, and lessons learned. I was moving through my own timeline at different speeds, without trying to make the history too clean. The drone underneath is the ancestors.

There’s also folding (origami). Not just as a visual form, but as something people do to fit within what society has decided is acceptable for them. People marginalized by race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, or age are constantly asked to adjust themselves. It happens creatively too. You begin reshaping the work, or reshaping yourself, so you can be understood, accepted, or simply allowed into the room. At some point, that adjustment can become a kind of self-erasure. You may fit, but you may also be failing some part of yourself in the process. I’m thinking about that.

The instability became part of the piece. The turning, shifting my weight, trying to stay intact while the structure moves. I wanted to make balance more difficult, not easier. Not freedom as escape, but freedom as staying present under pressure (jiu-jitsu).

Underneath all of this is my mother. Her childhood in Drew, Mississippi. The Delta blues moving through her before it ever reached me. Everything I make traces back to her, even before I knew that was what I was doing.

Thank you to everyone involved for including me in such a wonderful project. It is an honor to be associated with Jazz at Lincoln Center, an institution shaped by someone I have considered one of my heroes from the beginning, Mr. Wynton Marsalis.

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lagniappe

random sights

yesterday, Oak Park, Illinois