Ambrose Akinmusire came of age at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and his evolution into a creative force has unfolded on its stages.
The 44-year-old composer and trumpeter will return to the Monterey County Fairgrounds for the 69th Festival, running Sept. 25-27. As the 2026 Artist-in-Residence, Akinmusire will be at the center of the action throughout the weekend — he intends to celebrate MJF’s rich history while encouraging young players to embrace what makes them unique.
He was a gifted teenager when he made his MJF debut at the turn of the century with the award-winning Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble and the Next Generation Jazz Orchestra, the centerpiece of the Festival’s education programs.
“It was amazing on many levels,” Akinmusire said from his home in Berkeley. “As a young musician, it was always cool to be around young, like-minded peers, feeling you weren’t a weirdo.
“It was so cool extending beyond that world and feeling part of a larger community… [We would] play the festival with guests like Terence Blanchard and Clark Terry. Now I’m the special guest.”
Akinmusire last performed at MJF in 2023 when he premiered his festival commission, a celebratory collaboration with Malian superstar Oumou Sangaré. This year’s commissioned artist, bassist and composer Meshell Ndegeocello, presents “America 250,” a pointed meditation on the nation’s birthday.
The piece is informed by her father, Army Sergeant Major and saxophonist Jacques Johnson, who was a member of the U.S. Army Blues, the elite jazz ensemble connected to the United States Army Band, “Pershing’s Own.”
Ndegeocello embraces her father’s legacy, and keenly remembers him performing at the Jefferson Memorial for the Bicentennial Fourth of July. “I’m a child of the military and I’ll argue with people about how important that was,” she said. “It changed my life, and it changed my father’s life.”
Jason Olaine and pianist Gerald Clayton, who were tapped to direct the festival last year, are committed to showcasing the organization’s legacy of nurturing young talent.
“One of the most compelling stories to tell at Monterey is about education,” Olaine said. “We’re shining a spotlight on a lot of the Next Gen alumni, a list that’s long and strong. We’re going to have Ambrose back next year, too.”
But first Akinmusire must survive the MJF69 gauntlet, which includes special guest appearances with both the Next Generation Jazz Orchestra directed by Gerald Clayton and its companion ensemble, the Next Generation Women in Jazz Combo directed by bassist and vocalist Katie Thiroux.
He’s also a key component of a recently announced project dubbed “The Monterey Surprise: Throwback to ‘58.” An all-star sextet designed to celebrate the jazz icons who launched the festival in 1958, including Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Sonny Rollins, Billie Holiday, Max Roach and the Modern Jazz Quartet, will perform Saturday afternoon on the outdoor Ray Drummond West End Stage.
The sextet features Akinmusire, Clayton, tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana, vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, drummer Brian Blade, and bassist Larry Grenadier.
The six high-profile musicians share numerous overlapping connections. Akinmusire and Clayton first met as high schoolers in the Next Gen Orchestra, while Akinmusire and Salvant were bandmates in 2012 in the Attica Blues Orchestra with era-defining saxophonist, now-89-year-old Archie Shepp.
Reunited in a group bristling with protean players, the sextet is committed to honoring their ancestors by not walking in their footsteps.
“Gerald and I have been talking a lot about it,” Akinmusire said. “We’re playing songs from the Armstrong and Dizzy sets but not trying to recreate them. We’re playing them now.”
Akinmusire and Clayton are featured in a similar endeavor Sunday afternoon on the Tim Jackson Garden Stage with drummer Gregory Hutchinson’s Kind of Now–The Pulse of Miles. A longtime resident of Rome, Hutchinson just finished a thrilling four-night run at the SFJAZZ Center with Christian McBride, and his Miles Davis centennial project includes veteran saxophonist Ron Blake, rising guitarist Emmanuel Michael, and bassist Reuben Rogers.
Akinmusire worked most recently with Hutchinson when the drummer subbed for Herlin Riley on a tour with Owl Music, his trio project with guitarist Bill Frisell, “but I was a fan before I met him,” the trumpeter said. “He was on the first or second jazz CD I ever bought, Eric Reed’s ‘It’s Alright to Swing.’ I saw him with Ray Brown a lot, and Josh Redman had the band with him. We’d see each other at festivals, and we taught a little in Italy together.”
It’s speaks to Akinmusire’s far-flung creative pursuits that his set with his own longtime quartet Sunday afternoon on the West End Stage is a rare West Coast reunion. In recent years the band has worked mostly at the Village Vanguard, where they recorded a CD last June. With pianist Sam Harris, bassist Harish Raghavan and drummer Justin Brown, a buddy of Akinmusire’s since their days at Berkeley High together, the group returns for its first performance in the area since he kicked off his 2023 stint as a resident artistic director at the SFJAZZ Center with special guest Joshua Redman (Akinmusire returns to SFJAZZ in March for performances with Owl Song and his quartet).
Monterey isn’t the only jazz space Akinmusire is transforming. He was quietly appointed the Director of Jazz at Stanford University last year, a position that’s still taking shape. He’s taking over for Jim Nadel, who also launched and led the Stanford Jazz Workshop and its jazz festival for half a century, programs hosted by but independent of Stanford University. With fellow Berkeley High graduate Joshua Redman also on faculty at Stanford, Berkeley seems to leading this particular competition in its eternal struggle with Palo Alto.
While he’s enmeshed in the world of jazz, jazz doesn’t define Akinmusire’s creative horizons. On Dec. 4-5, Cal Performances will present the West Coast premiere of “A a | a B : B E N D,” a piece that combines rigorous structure with improvisation. At the concert, Akinmusire will perform his score live on trumpet and electronics.
The Cal Performances concert is the first in a series of Akinmusire’s collaborations with Edmonton-raised Aszure Barton, the internationally acclaimed choreographer best known in the Bay Area for her San Francisco Ballet hit “Mere Mortals.”
The trumpeter was familiar with her work when she reached out to him about working together. “A lot of people ask me to collaborate and I don’t always say yes,” Akinmusire said. “But there was something about her work that stuck with me. We talked for a year and a half about rhythms and bodies and music before I knew what we were doing.
It’s different from most collaborations with jazz and dance. I didn’t write a score and give it to her. We created this together and it’s hard to distinguish between the dance and music.”
