Abram Wilson, an acclaimed American jazz trumpeter and composer from New Orleans who helped lead a new generation of jazz artists in Britain, performing as a kind of cultural attaché from the jazz homeland, died on June 9 in London. He was 38.

He died several days after suspending a concert tour and checking into a hospital with stomach pains, his wife, Jennie Cashman, told London newspaper The Evening Standard. The cause was cancer, his wife said.

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.

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