Christian Scott always knew there would be consequences. It’s been a minute since his last album, the acclaimed Yesterday You Said Tomorrow, broadcast the trumpeter among jazz’s vanguard of composing bandleaders under 30. In the two short years since, Scott has seen and sanctioned a spate of pivotal changes: he’s become engaged, toured extensively, uncovered a new wealth of underreported controversy to germinate fresh compositions, and completed, as he terms it, his name with West African nomenclature. It all finds a place within the sprawl of Scott’s new, and jaggedly brilliant double album Christian aTunde Adjuah (Concord). Joining the trumpet player once again is his sterling coterie from the previous record,save for the entrant Lawrence Fields on piano. To Scott this latest offering continues the musical math already begun by that band, also drummer Jamire Williams, bassist Kris Funn and, in lieu of a more conventional quintet’s second horn, electric guitarist Matthew Stevens. The theory behind their approach—codified as “stretch music”— is detailed in an essay Scott has written for the liner notes to Christian aTunde Adjuah. As it turns out, those musical equations are the product of a deeper philosophy, which Scott ties to his own past, in several tiers. There’s his upbringing, evident in the Mardis Gras Indians plumage he wears on the album’s cover, but also in the few songs that point to New Orleans in title and rhythm. Then there are the roots that extend to his heritage along the Gold Coast: They seem to account for the reach of the album in a macro sense, but also give it some of its specific track titles. Scott also leaves room in his essay to recall a debate over jazz’s strictures, wherein some elder statesmen dolefully discuss the waves being made by contemporary—and presumably younger—musicians. “They felt that what we were creating should not be called Jazz,” writes Scott. He disagreed. But the conversation does little to sway his priority of education, of grasping the past in order to innovate more convincingly in the present. Most important, the trumpeter seems to argue, is the history of jazz itself. His dogma isn’t righteous or even inflexible, but it is fierce. It links him to some of the music’s most familiar trumpeters, whom also happen to be synonymous with the extremes of that same argument. But if Miles Davis’ progressivism is a pole to Wynton Marsalis’s classicism, then Scott owns a unique swatch of his own design, and he’s more than willing to defend it.
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