By the time the lone standard "What's New?" arrives with a wink 11 tracks into trumpeter-composer Ambrose Akinmusire's tour de force Blue Note debut When The Heart Emerges Glistening, the song's title has become a rhetorical question. The unneeded answer: Everything. Akinmusire has delivered nothing less than a manifesto, a Search for the New Land, a personal statement of such clarity and vision that it's bound to turn heads around towards this startlingly fresh young talent.

Co-produced by Akinmusire and his label mate and mentor Jason Moran, the album's 12 songs (10 of which were composed by Akinmusire) feature the 28-year-old trumpeter's young quintet (tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III, pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Harish Raghavan, and drummer Justin Brown), a close-knit group of longtime friends and frequent collaborators that breathes a remarkable collective identity.

The album's opening track "Confessions to My Unborn Daughter" immediately establishes several of the quintet's hallmarks including their striking juxtaposition of bombast and beauty, with searing solos turning on a dime to reveal moments of touching tenderness, and the profound frontline interplay between Akinmusire and Smith. The way the two intuitively trade lines back-and-forth, finishing each other's musical sentences, is surely a result of the 12 years that they've been making music together.

"My Name Is Oscar" is a powerful piece that features Akinmusire's spoken voice backed solely by Brown's relentless drums. Oscar is Oscar Grant, the unarmed 22-year-old African American man who was shot and killed by a transit officer on New Year's Eve in 2009 in Akinmusire's hometown of Oakland. "I just want people to know the story. I don't want it to become this ‘f*ck the police' anthem,'" he says.

Tour Dates
April 14-17 – Jazz Standard – New York, NY
April 26 – Redwood Jazz Alliance – Arcata, CA
April 28 – Outpost Performance Space – Albuquerque, NM
April 29 – Detroit Institute of the Arts – Detroit, MI
May 1 – Tri-C JazzFest – Cleveland, OH
May 6 – Vincenza Jazz – Vincenza, Italy
May 7 – La Spirale – Fribourg, Switzerland
May 9 – Musig im Ochsen – Muri, Switzerland
May 10 – A-Trane – Berlin, Germany
May 11 – Sendesaal Bremen – Bremen, Germany
May 12 – Club Unterfahrt – Munich, Germany
May 13 – Théâtre de Cavaillon – Cavaillon, France
May 14 – Bimhuis – Amsterdam, The Netherlands
May 16 – DeWerf – Brugge, Belgium
May 17 – Jazz à Saint-Germain-Des-Pres 2011 – Paris, France
May 18 – Ronnie Scott’s – London, United Kingdom
May 19 – Club Fasching – Stockholm, Sweden
May 21 – Athenaeum’s San Diego Studio – San Diego, CA
May 22 – SFJAZZ @ Yerba Buena Center for the Arts – San Francisco, CA
May 23-24 – Daly Jazz – Missoula, MT
June 11 – Playboy Jazz Festival – Los Angeles, CA