Arnetta Johnson blurs the hip-hop and jazz lines more than ever on “Move Around”

“Disruptive jazz is my style,” reads Arnetta Johnson‘s social media bio, and if you know her music, you know exactly what she means. A trumpet player schooled from a young age, she was a founding member of Camden, NJ’s Trumpet Chics collective, went on to play alongside Beyoncé in her legendary Homecoming set at Coachella in 2018, and has made her mark on the community she came up in with the ensemble SUNNY, who have played Philly Music Fest twice and appeared in the Key Studio Sessions in 2019.

While Johnson’s 2019 album If You Hear a Trumpet It’s Me fluidly meshed trap beats and hip-hop grooves with soaring brass leads, her latest single, “Move Around” steps even further in the pop world. Yes, she tried her hand at lead vocals on the record, but here she goes all in, with a wall of her trumpets in the back and her commanding vocal in the forefront: “Black pride, big life / cruising with the ancestors by my side,” she sings, her delivery dipped in vocal effects, a dramatic tympani beat driving her forward as she sings of careening down her own lane.

Check it out below in the music video that finds Johnson playing chess, posing on a car, sipping bottled water, and of course, playing her horn.