| Jazz |
The first note does not announce itself. It hovers.
In a small room, the trumpet enters almost reluctantly, not with bravado, but with inquiry. A tone held just long enough to test the air. Then another, thinner, bending slightly at the edge. Silence follows, but it is not empty. It feels charged, as if something beneath the surface is beginning to burn.
I knew the trumpeter only by reputation. And yet, within minutes, it became clear that whatever I had read about Dave Adewumi understated the truth. It is not hyperbole to suggest that we may be witnessing a genuine musical intellect of rare dimension, one whose improvisations feel less assembled than unearthed, as though drawn from a deep and private interior reservoir.
Jazz, at its most inspired, has never been merely aesthetic. It has always carried political voltage. Adewumi understands this lineage, from the existential defiance of mid-century modernism to the sharper confrontations of the late 1960s, when figures such as Miles Davis reshaped the grammar of the music in response to a fractured America. Adewumi’s politics, however, are not declamatory. They are structural.
His album The Flame Beneath the Silence addresses what he describes as political anguish tied to American authoritarianism, existential instability and the search for truth-bearing figures. Songs of creation and love coexist with this anxiety. The titles, he suggests, establish atmosphere more than message. The tension itself is the statement.
You hear that tension in the architecture of the music. Phrases extend beyond expected cadences. Rhythms displace the listener’s footing without collapsing into chaos. Harmonies pivot abruptly, but with purpose. At moments, Adewumi employs space the way late-period Davis did, not as absence, but as pressure. Silence becomes a rhythmic component. Notes are not merely played; they are weighed.
There is an urban pulse here, elastic, restless, intertwined with diasporic memory. At times the compositional intentions brush against contemporary classical sensibilities: long arcs, textural layering, restraint. Yet the rhythmic language remains unmistakably rooted in jazz’s living bloodstream. The effect is neither nostalgic nor futurist. It is urgent.
It is hardly accidental that this work appears under the banner of Giant Step Arts, the artist-centered nonprofit founded in 2018 by Jimmy Katz and Dena Katz. In collaboration with the trumpeter Jason Palmer, the organization’s series has consistently highlighted musicians shaping the contemporary jazz landscape while nurturing those positioned to define its next chapter. Adewumi fits squarely within that continuum, a younger artist with an old soul and an uncompromising vision.
Born to Nigerian parents and raised in New Hampshire, he developed an early, almost insatiable appetite for sound that led him to the New England Conservatory. There he studied under formidable mentors, including Ralph Alessi, Ran Blake, Frank Carlberg, John McNeil and the late Laurie Frink. From them he inherited not simply technique, but discipline, an understanding that intellectual rigor and emotional risk are not opposing forces, but interdependent ones.
“There is a tension between the personal and the political, the sacred and collapse,” Adewumi has said. “I want that tension to remain alive and generative.” That refusal to resolve contradiction may be the album’s defining strength.
In an era increasingly shaped by algorithmic efficiency and accelerated release cycles, Adewumi’s work feels almost defiant. Art of this density resists deadlines. It demands incubation. Ideas that burn too hot at inception must be digested before they can be rendered in sound. This is not music designed for passive consumption or background ambience. It requires, and rewards, active listening.
That intensity may also challenge some audiences. Adewumi does not seduce in conventional ways. There are no easy crescendos engineered for applause. The intellectual density of his compositions invites repeated encounters. Casual listeners may find the terrain demanding. But difficulty, in this context, is not exclusionary; it is ethical. The music refuses simplification because the realities it grapples with refuse simplification.
If many critics have found themselves struck by Adewumi, it is perhaps because he embodies something we are often encouraged to suppress: the belief that art can still operate as conscience. That it can question power. That it can hold sacredness and collapse within the same breath.
The flame beneath the silence is not a metaphor of destruction. It is endurance. It is the quiet, persistent heat of reflection in a society inclined toward noise. And when Adewumi lifts the trumpet for a final phrase, letting the note thin, waver and finally dissolve, the silence that follows does not feel empty.
It feels illuminated.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, February 27th 2026
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Musicians :
Dave Adewumi, composer, trompeter
Joel Ross, Vibes
Linda May Oh, Bass
Marcus Gilmore, drums
Track Listing :
The Flame Beneath The Silence
Is
Abandon
Breach The Gap
Infinite Loop
Pensive
The Vine
Out Cry
If I Need To Do This Again I’m Going To Throw A Fit
The Light You Left Behind
Produced by Jimmy Katz & Dave Adewumi for Giant Step Arts Non-Profit, 02025
Special thank you to arts visionaries Rie Yamaguchi-Borden & Mitch Borden of Ornithology in Brooklyn, New York, for their generosity.
All Compositions © by Dave Adewumi
Recorded b y Jimmy Katz & James Kogan Live At Ornithology, Brooklyn New York, July Gsth & 7th, 2024
Mixed and Mastered by Jimmy Katz with Dave Darlington
Photography & Design by Jimmy & Dena Katz with Carl Chisolm