MELT All the Guns are a revolutionary jazz trio formed by drummer Devin Gray, trumpeter Ralph Alessi and a pianist Myslaure Augustin.

Their music radiates now-times in the US and Berlin, where Gray spends much of his time. I ask him about his life in music and the themes of the trio’s new album, Melt All the Guns 2.

Born in Portland, Maine in 1983, his father a businessman, his mother a health worker, it was his grandfather who set him on the road to jazz.

“He knew and really loved tons of classical music and jazz — Ellington, Coltrane, Monk and Max Roach — and gave me my first LPs by drummers Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. He helped me know bebop through the history of the civil rights movement.

“At middle school I started on piano and drums and around 16 I spent a summer school with some New York musicians, which truly brought history in line with real jazz happenings.”

In 2006 he moved to New York for a master’s at Manhattan School of Music.

“I’d started playing professionally at high school because I wanted to play and work at music all day, rather than at some boring job that took me away from music. My drum heroes were Max, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams, with Terry Lyne Carrington and Cindy Blackman. Many others too, wow!”

I ask whether he felt the trio inherited the strong political alignment of Roach and Charles Mingus. He seizes on Mingus’s name: “Mingus is amazing all around for me — as composer, songwriter, bassist and just a bad-ass person and truth spreader — alongside Max and his freedom suites. I’m absolutely inspired by them because they made me realise that you can actually speak the truth through music, that they go hand in hand and actually make a difference in the world, waking people up to the things that matter by their brilliant historical groundwork.”

Why Berlin? “I first went to Berlin on tour in 2006, and went back every year until the pandemic. I knew it was the place for me, a wonderful city with a rich history and brilliant cultural traditions, a city of endless artistic dreams. It’s a more sincere place to focus on my musical work.”

And in the midst of “Trumpery,” had the trio been targeted by hostile media and forces of political backwardness?

“Trump is nothing to care about, look up to or listen to. A trash-can ego psychologically ill! Yes there have been some strong backlashes against our music from gun lovers and NRA lobbyists and supporters. I’m happy about that — that’s the point. What people need to hear is opposition against such stupidity, the sounds of real change and progress for the people.”

What about his two trio-mates?

“Ralph is a brilliant musical interpreter. He just burns when it comes to melodic improvisation, what a quick musical thinker! I love Myslaure’s musical touch and sound and her sense of groove. She grew up listening to Mozart, Beethoven and the rhythms of Haitian music and gospel in her family church.”

In the album’s opener, East Berlin 2024, the threesome, Alessi in particular, don’t just approach sound, they attack it, and in Swing States Myslaure’s swinging sonic undercurrents and Gray’s thrashing drums are the pulsating bedrock of Alessi’s bursting notes.

In Administration Rulez Alessi’s high notes and Myslaure’s sure-fingered, rampaging solo break through bureaucracy, while the album title tune gives a trumpet voice of sorrow over Myslaure’s ivories of lamentation, gradually turning to tenderness and fading birdsong.

No More Walls is a riposte to Trumpery, with Alessi’s horn, Myslaure’s lyricism and Gray’s defiant drums speaking openness, friendship and warm welcome: no slogans, only human sounds.

Gray sounds like a William Morris of jazz when he says of his trio’s music: “In a world ever more consumed with social media and AI, this music is truly handmade, an artisanal, human creation. We need these things to wake us up, aesthetically and culturally, heart and mind.”

Melt All the Guns 2 is released by Rataplan Records, the trio play at the Vortex, Dalston, London on November 1 (www.vortexjazz.co.uk).