Abram Wilson

Laura told me about this musician, and of seeing his obit while sitting at our favorite restaurant in Kingston, the Canard Enchaine. As she described him, he was indeed a fascinating person.

Mr. Wilson, who was raised in New Orleans and steeped in its hybrid musical traditions, was known for combining musical forms — melding quicksilver bebop with cloudbursts of hip-hop or passages of Stevie Wonder sung in his modest Sunday chorister’s voice.

He wove story lines into some of his most ambitious music. The autobiographical 2007 concept album, “Ride! Ferris Wheel to the Modern Day Delta,” for example, was a kind of jazz opera about a trumpeter who tries to escape his jazz roots to become a hip-hop megastar, but who returns to the fold in the end. 

While earning a clutch of British awards for his work, including a BBC Jazz Award for best new CD in 2007, Mr. Wilson demonstrated a commitment to his American jazz roots that often surfaced with almost missionary fervor, music critics said. Onstage, between numbers, he sometimes gave extemporaneous history lessons about the many musical currents that flowed into New Orleans jazz. 

Mr. Wilson attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. also studied there), and graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University before earning a master’s degree in performance and composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester.

 In New York he formed his own quartet and played with the trumpeter Roy Hargrove’s big band, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the rhythm and blues singer Ruth Brown. After moving to London in 2002, Mr. Wilson made three albums for Dune Records, a British jazz label: “Jazz Warrior” (2004), “Ride! Ferris Wheel to the Modern Day Delta” (2007) and “Life Paintings” (2009).

His survivors include his wife, his parents, four brothers, a sister and his grandmother, Oradell Barker.

He had recently finished and begun performing a jazz suite about the life of Philippa Schuyler, an American piano prodigy, born to a black father and white mother, who toured the country in the 1930s and ’40s, became disillusioned by American racism and died in 1967 on a charitable mission in Vietnam at age 35.

In a review in April, John Fordham, a jazz critic for The Guardian, described the piece as a poignant portrait of an artist undone by the American racial divide. Mr. Wilson, he wrote, hoped to stage it as a play soon, adding, “It is a work in progress that will be fascinating to follow.”