Max Millar Music

Tag: writing

  • The Trouble with Beauty: Ambrose Akinmusire’s honey from a winter stone

    by Max Millar

    There’s a point, somewhere around the twelfth minute of s-/Kinfolks—a thirty-minute suite that feels, at times, like a cross between a Miles Davis outtake and a séance—where Ambrose Akinmusire’s trumpet seems to hesitate. It’s not a mistake, not even a rest in the usual sense, but a deliberate inhalation. The listener inhales with him. Then, almost imperceptibly, the strings resume, and a voice—Kokayi’s, cracked with exhaustion—cuts through the air like a moral interruption. “You give me rocks so I can sink when I swim.” It’s one of those moments that jazz still allows: something raw, uncomfortable, and unsummarizable happens, and you realize that beauty alone isn’t what the artist is after.

    Akinmusire has always struck me as an artist uneasy with beauty, or at least with its easy consumption. His earlier Owl Song was a delicate and deeply contemplative record—so beautiful, in fact, that critics ran out of adjectives and began to quote each other. honey from a winter stone, his second release for Nonesuch, seems determined to escape that corner. It’s the kind of record that, if you leave it on while doing the dishes, you’ll find yourself stopping mid-plate, a little annoyed that it demands your full attention.

    He has built it around a principle borrowed from the late Julius Eastman, the brilliant, self-destructive composer whose music was as much about social defiance as it was about sonic innovation. Eastman called his method “organic music”—the gradual layering and transformation of material until form itself became an act of resistance. Akinmusire, in taking Eastman’s cue, seems to be asking what it means for a Black jazz musician to make “organic music” in 2025, when even outrage risks being commodified.

    The opening track, Muffled Screams, unfolds in a series of “episodes,” like a dream that keeps rewriting itself. Akinmusire’s trumpet begins almost alone, rising out of Sam Harris’s rippling piano and Justin Brown’s anxious drumming, before handing off to the Mivos String Quartet and, eventually, to Kokayi’s voice—a voice that doesn’t so much rap as think aloud in rhythm. The seams between sections are seamless; what’s remarkable is not the range of styles (hip-hop, chamber music, ambient minimalism) but how calmly they coexist. This, perhaps, is Akinmusire’s answer to the chaos of contemporary culture: not fusion, but empathy.

    He calls the album a self-portrait, and you believe him. Across its five tracks, he stages a kind of internal conversation—between disciplines, between identities, between the seductions of form and the urgencies of lived experience. Owled sounds, at first, like the soundtrack to a postmodern nature documentary, all shifting textures and slow pulses, but by its final minutes it’s become a miniature requiem, the strings sighing behind the trumpet as if for the idea of coherence itself.

    And yet, for all its cerebral scaffolding, the record is deeply, sometimes disarmingly, emotional. Akinmusire’s tone—alternately fragile and ferocious—feels like a confession more than a performance. The long final track, s-/Kinfolks, drifts through grief and defiance, ending not with resolution but with exhaustion. The silence afterward feels earned, as if both musician and listener have survived something.

    Listening to honey from a winter stone is like reading a difficult novel: the reward isn’t pleasure but recognition. You come away reminded that complexity itself can be a moral stance—that coherence, in a fractured world, is a kind of courage.

    Akinmusire may be the closest thing jazz has to a novelist: patient, self-interrogating, wary of virtuosity for its own sake. His music keeps circling the same themes—memory, identity, the impossibility of speaking for a community without also implicating oneself—but it never resolves them. It can’t.

    And maybe that’s the point. In a culture that prizes immediacy and affirmation, honey from a winter stone insists on difficulty, on listening as a form of work. It’s an album that withholds as much as it gives, that reminds us, as Eastman did, that the truest kind of beauty comes from resistance.

    It’s not music for everyone. It’s music for the part of you that still believes art should change you, even—especially—when it hurts.

  • From Tin Pan Alley to TikTok: The Evolution of Pop into Jazz Standards

    Introduction: The Elastic Boundaries of the Jazz Canon

    Jazz, more than any other art form, thrives on reinterpretation. The very act of making a “standard” in jazz has never depended solely on composition, but rather on recomposition: the process by which musicians reimagine existing songs through improvisation, reharmonization, and rhythmic transformation. Historically, the so-called “jazz standards” were not born within jazz at all—they emerged from the popular music of their day. What we now regard as canonical repertoire—“All the Things You Are,” “Body and Soul,” “My Funny Valentine”—were, in their own time, the pop hits of Broadway and Hollywood.

    As jazz continues to evolve alongside contemporary culture, the question arises: which of today’s pop songs might, in decades to come, undergo the same metamorphosis from radio hit to bandstand staple?

    I. The Great American Songbook: Popular Music Reimagined

    When we examine the early to mid-20th century, the relationship between jazz and popular song is symbiotic. The composers of the Great American Songbook—Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers—provided the raw materials for improvisation. These songs, often written for musical theatre or film, possessed a harmonic and melodic sophistication that lent itself to jazz reinterpretation.

    Take Kern’s “All the Things You Are” (1939): a tune from a Broadway musical (Very Warm for May) that became a harmonic playground for jazz musicians from Charlie Parker to Keith Jarrett. Or consider “My Favorite Things” (Rodgers and Hammerstein, 1959), whose transformation by John Coltrane in 1960 redefined not only the song but the modal jazz landscape itself.

    In these cases, the “popular” origins of the tunes were essential. Jazz musicians sought common cultural reference points—melodies that audiences recognized, yet which could be deconstructed and reborn through improvisation.

    II. The Second Wave: Pop Standards of the Late 20th Century

    By the 1960s and 1970s, the mainstream of popular music had shifted from Broadway to the recording studio. Jazz artists began turning to The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, and later, Sting and Björk, for inspiration. Herbie Hancock’s “The New Standard” (1996) formalized this practice, featuring jazz renditions of pop songs by Don Henley, Nirvana, and The Beatles.

    Songs such as “Yesterday” and “Norwegian Wood” became as frequently reinterpreted in jazz as “Autumn Leaves” or “Misty.” The harmonic language of pop was evolving, but so too was jazz’s appetite for hybridization.

    This era revealed a critical truth: the “standard” is not a fixed category but a dynamic process of cultural negotiation. What makes a song a standard is not when it was written, but how well it can bear the weight of improvisation.

    III. Pop Songs of Today: The Future Jazz Standards?

    If we fast-forward to the 2020s, we find ourselves in a new musical ecology—one shaped by streaming algorithms and viral trends. Yet, even in this fragmented landscape, certain pop compositions display the structural and emotional depth that could invite future jazz reinterpretation.

    A few plausible candidates include:

    • Billie Eilish – “Happier Than Ever” (2021): Its gradual crescendo and harmonic shift from intimacy to catharsis echo the narrative arcs of classic standards. A jazz trio could easily explore its contrasting sections with dynamic improvisation.
    • Adele – “Someone Like You” (2011): With its timeless melody and clear harmonic motion, this song could function as the “Body and Soul” of the streaming era.
    • Bruno Mars – “Leave the Door Open” (2021): Already a nod to 1970s soul-jazz aesthetics, it could fit seamlessly into a future Real Book volume.
    • Taylor Swift – “Anti-Hero” (2022): Its introspective lyricism and chordal subtleties lend themselves to re-harmonization; imagine a slow swing or bossa nova rendition.
    • Jacob Collier – “All I Need” (2020): Though harmonically dense already, its rich textures and modulations invite jazz musicians to extend and reinterpret its layered complexity.

    In each of these examples, the potential for jazzification lies not only in harmonic sophistication but in emotional universality—an essential trait shared by both the Great American Songbook and contemporary pop.

    IV. Conclusion: The Continuing Conversation

    The jazz standard is not a relic of the past but a living tradition—an ongoing conversation between popular culture and improvisational artistry. As the sources of “popular” music shift—from Tin Pan Alley to Top 40 to TikTok—the jazz community continues to reinterpret the sonic vocabulary of the moment.

    Just as swing-era musicians once transformed show tunes into art music, the next generation of jazz artists will no doubt find inspiration in today’s pop anthems. The standards of tomorrow may well come from Spotify playlists rather than sheet music publishers, but the underlying process—the creative alchemy of jazz reinterpretation—remains timeless.

    In the end, the question is not whether pop songs can become jazz standards, but rather which songs will endure long enough, and resonate deeply enough, to invite the endless reinvention that defines jazz itself.