Young gun

Four minutes into the opening track of his new album, Yesterday You Said Tomorrow, Christian Scott works a solo up to fever pitch, blaring out an aggressive high note on his trumpet — when suddenly, off-mic, he lets out a long, loud bellow.

Like John Coltrane before him, Christian Scott uses instrumental jazz as a means of personal expression and political engagement.

As it turns out, the 27-year-old rising star of jazz was yelling because his lip had just split apart. "There was blood in the mouthpiece. It hurt like hell," he recalls. Nonetheless, just a few seconds later, he reached back up to the same note.

Clearly, Scott isn’t one to take the easy route. Four years ago, when the New Orleans native signed a deal with Concord Records, he refused to boost his "jazz credibility" by releasing the obligatory debut album of standards, opting instead to showcase his cliché-free hybrid of jazz, soul, funk and rock. Rather than assemble pickup bands of well-known sidemen for recording and touring, Scott gathered a bunch of unheralded, hungry young musicians from his own generation.

And when he lost his trumpets in the flood following Hurricane Katrina, he had a new horn constructed that would help him change his sound – but also made playing in the upper register more difficult.

Over the phone from New Orleans, where he runs a summer jazz camp with his uncle, saxist Donald Harrison, Scott explains that he’s willing to put up with the resultant scarring in order to "create a voice that ensured people would always be able to pick me out of the crowd, in the same way that you can say, ‘I know that’s Louis Armstrong,’ or Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie."

Scott based the sound on his mother’s singing voice — his tone is breathy and somewhat dusky, becoming plaintive, but never shrill, in the higher register. Occasionally, it bursts into blazing outrage, as on the track that split his lip: K.K.P.D., or Ku Klux Police Department. Other track titles on Yesterday include Angola, LA & the 13^th Amendment, American’t and The Last Broken Heart (Prop 8). Like John Coltrane before him, Scott uses instrumental jazz as a means of personal expression and political engagement.

"Typically, when you don’t have words, it allows you to give a more visceral example of your sentiment," he says. "I think, if I growl on the trumpet you can tell I’m angry more than me saying, ‘F---!’ Sometimes, people are more perplexed about someone’s sentiment if they say something than if they [make] a sound."

The sounds on Yesterday You Said Tomorrow are carefully constructed to evoke emotions while making references to the history of American music – and not just jazz. For instance, the opening passage of K.K.P.D. — in which guitarist Matthew Stevens plays with a dark twang and drummer Jamire Williams delivers a flurry of crashing rhythms — took "six or seven months" to devise. Scott had Stevens listen to music from Pulaski, Tenn., the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, in an attempt "to build a sound that sounds like someone that naturally hates." Meanwhile, the trumpeter asked Williams to thread African rhythms together with the "snap-crackle" of American jazz drummer Roy Haynes and the bass-drum blip of Roland 808-driven hip-hop, so that he would represent "the entire African diaspora in his introduction." The whole album, says Scott, is just as conceptually dense.

Only the devoted members of a leader’s working band could be expected to make the commitment required to learn and develop such music. Jazz’s greatest stars have benefited from such outfits – think of Coltrane’s famous 1960s quartet, Miles Davis’s two quintets, Oscar Peterson’s and Bill Evans’s trios. Each group was dedicated to a common vision and goal, united under a headliner’s name.

"It’s rough to keep a band these days," says Scott, "’cause nobody wants you to play with musicians that are willing to actually cultivate anything with you – [record companies] want you to play with the guys who are already stars." He’s maintained his current quintet, with bassist Kris Funn and pianist Milton Fletcher, for two years, although Fletcher is set to depart soon, to become a preacher. Even as Scott says he "fully supports" the move, he knows it will be difficult to replace Fletcher’s intensity. "Of course someone’s going to come along, and it’s going to be a beautiful experience to grow with that person, but it also becomes disheartening."

Scott should have no trouble attracting suitors for the pianist’s bench in his band. His profile has risen considerably of late: He has been the subject of a Down Beat cover story; has guested with The Roots on Jimmy Fallon’s show; and has joined Thom Yorke’s band live on the song The Eraser, the one cover tune on Yesterday.  What’s more, Scott’s music is featured in the upcoming film Passion Play, which stars Mickey Rourke as a 1950s jazz trumpeter.

In coaching Rourke to simulate playing the horn, Scott thought back to the Miles Davis videos he would study for hours as a teenager, "just to watch what he reacted to." Miles is the one musician whose name comes up inevitably in discussions of Scott’s work, and not just because the young trumpeter has been playing in the touring tribute to Davis’s 1986 album Tutu. Comparisons between the two extend beyond a rejection of virtuosity for its own sake to a shared interest in fashion (Scott harbours a desire to start his own clothing line) and acting (Scott hopes to work with his brother, a budding film director).

Sometimes the connection can even seem paranormal. At one point in the sessions for Yesterday, Scott sat cross-legged by the piano, practising classical music with his trumpet mute. Legendary engineer Rudy Van Gelder later told him that the last time he did a session with Davis, the jazz icon was sitting in exactly the same spot, in the same way, playing classical music with a mute.

It’s tempting to think that Scott could be a similarly iconic figure in jazz, moving the music forward with his imagination and force of will. But the young trumpeter — voluble and friendly, where Davis could be suspicious and abrasive — declares humbler intentions.

"I just want to do as much as possible with my life," he says. "I want to try different things. I’ve spent the last 14 years of my life playing the trumpet; I don’t see anything wrong with spreading my wings a little bit."

Christian Scott plays the Toronto Jazz Festival on July 3, the Ottawa Jazz Festival on July 4 and the Montreal International Jazz Festival on July 5.

Mike Doherty is a writer based in Toronto.