An outstanding threesome

He began on the piano when he was six and switched to trumpet while at secondary school. He had two formidable trumpeters as his tutors and models - Kenny Dorham, who had been Charlie Parker's front-line horn partner, and the audacious Jazz Messenger Lee Morgan.

Campbell blew his way through many trumpet traditions, from bop, funk and R&B before settling within the compelling influence of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians with such free spirits as pianist Cecil Taylor, altoist Henry Threadgill and drummer Sunny Murray.

He cut his first two innovative and hard-blown albums, New Kingdom (1992) and Tierra Del Fuego (1994), with the adventurous Chicago label, Delmark.

In Ethnic Stew And Brew, cut in 2000, he is one part of an outstanding threesome of interacting musical genius that forms the Pyramid Trio.

The bassist is William Parker, the Bronx-born giant born in the same year as Campbell and already a veteran of New York free jazz circles having played and recorded with pianists Taylor and Matthew Shipp, tenorists Charles Gayle and Frank Lowe and violinist Billy Bang, and never as a mere accompanist, always as an equal.

As is Hamid Drake, born in Louisiana in 1955, a drummer of profound power and empathy with his confreres, who moved northwards to Chicago with his family. He was tutored by the drummer son of the legendary tenorist Fred Anderson and finally became the drummer in Anderson's regular group in his Velvet Lounge club.

There is an aura of internationalism about Ethnic Stew And Brew. Like many great jazzmen before him from Trickly Sam Nanton and Wynton Kelly to Sonny Rollins, Campbell has Caribbean lineage and his sound carries a rich cosmopolitanism, not only through his own Trinidadian and Barbadian roots, the African longing of his sound, but also evocations of Asian soundscapes as in the tracks Impressions Of Yokohama and Heavenly Ascending. As he says in his sleevenotes, "to me the Pyramid Trio is about world music with a touch of jazz."

And quite a touch too. Right throughout the opener Tazz's Dilemma, Parker's twanging life-pulse and Drake's grounding drums give a ceaseless earthbound movement for Campbell's belligerent horn.

When Parker's bow saws its choruses it is as if a great African tree is shaking. The transoceanic message of Malcolm, Martin And Mandela fuses resistance in two continents. March-like in parts, it suggests mass protest, with Campbell's high-note peals a call to permanent vigilance.

All the album's tunes were composed by Campbell and the jaunty Imhotep continues the forward movement with the trumpeter's breathy, pacy runs provoked by Parker's vibrant bow and Drake's pulsating rhythmic engine.

Impressions of Yokohama has Parker playing a Japanese shakukachi flute with Campbell's horn sounding as if he is ascending Fujiyama, whereas the title tune has a definite Caribbean flavour with bass, drums and Campbell's stop-time theme providing meshed tastes of dasheen, yam, bread-fruits, plantain and pigeon peas.

"You have to take people on a journey," says Campbell of his music. This one ends back in the Bronx and with the story of the death of Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old Guinean immigrant worker shot down by four New York Police Department officers in February 1999 with 41 bullets, within the lobby of his own apartment building. The police were acquitted of all charges.

Campbell's tune to him begins with Drake's solo African drums and some agonised horn vocalese. As Parker's bass comes resonating in and Campbell plays a mournfully beautiful, pure-toned chorus which bursts into crescendoed leaps in an amalgam of anger, tenderness and a cry for justice, we think too of our own Diallos, of Jean Charles de Menezes, Blair Peach, Ian Tomlinson and all those who came before and we understand how Campbell's brave music enfolds them too in its defiant and indignant notes.

Forty-one times he blows the same repeated note to end his sonic narrative. And as you listen, transfixed, you don't forget it.