Ambrose Akinmusire’s Satchel of Origami

This chapter discusses trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire’s use of unconventional music strategies to create innovative musical and performance art commentaries on police brutality across all of his recordings. It is argued that his compositions with lyrics “My Name Is Oscar” (2011) and “Rollcall for Those Absent” (2014) and “Free, White and 21” (2018) articulate his unflinching Black political thought on systemic violence whereas his improvised note choices on instrumental compositions like “Confessions to My Unborn Daughter” (2011) is a spatial art of collage that exploits and explores musical textures that represent his understanding of a Black sense of musical space. The chapter also claims that Akinmusire’s approach is not a rebellion toward what some critics would call jazz orthodoxy but a focused study of musical space and the lexicon of ancestral improvised language.