With new booking energy and refreshed ideas at Pizza Express Jazz Club – let’s not dwell on the more doughball-friendly steep-ticket smooth jazz to keep the suits in hq at bay – the club this week ahead of its plum booking next month of Melody Gardot has come up trumps once more with the appearance of the most exhilarating trumpeter to grace the global jazz stage since Miles Davis.

Ambrose Akinmusire (above) is playing the Soho club on Tuesday and Wednesday and it’s a little under 18 months since the trumpeter’s most recent album The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier To Paint was released, a quintet affair bolstered by strings and guest vocals. Apocalyptic in mood, with a strong socially conscious side to it ‘Rollcall For Those Absent’ just one of the highlights with the voice of a little child reciting a list of names familiar from news reports including Timothy Stansbury, Amadou Diallo, and Trayvon Martin’s, victims of racism in America, building on the social commentary. The liturgical aspect of Akinmusire’s work beyond the oblique reference in the album’s title also surfaces explicitly and in a spirit of humility on the increasingly free-form ‘J E Nilmah (Ecclesiastes 6:10).’

Born in Oakland, California, talent-spotted by Steve Coleman as a teen and recruited to the MBASE pioneer’s big band, going on to win the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 2007, Akinmusire appears at the Pizza joined by pianist Sam Harris, double bassist Harish Raghavan and drummer Justin Brown.

Ticket info and more details: here