SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER, 2021
VOLUME TEN NUMBER TWO
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
JUNIUS PAUL
(July 10-16)
JAMES BRANDON LEWIS
(July 17-23)
MAZZ SWIFT
(July 24-30)
WARREN WOLF
(July 31-August 6)
VICTOR GOULD
(August 7-13)
DANIEL BERNARD ROUMAIN
(August 14-20)
JESSE MONTGOMERY
(August 21-27
CHANDA DANCY
(August 28-September 3)
KAMASI WASHINGTON
(September 4-10)
FLORENCE PRICE
(September 11-17)
SEAN JONES
(September 18-24)
ALFA MIST
(September 25-October 1)
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/james-brandon-lewis-mn0002545948/biography
James Brandon Lewis
(b. 1983)
Artist Biography by Thom Jurek
James Brandon Lewis is a New York-based jazz tenor saxophonist, composer, and bandleader. His instrumental voice marries the emotional power of gospel, the grit and groove of blues and R&B, to the modal and vanguard influences of Albert Ayler and John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins' expressive melodic and tonal discipline. Moments, his 2010 debut was followed by two outings outings for Sony Masterworks' revived Okeh imprint: Divine Travels in 2014 and the widely celebrated Days Of FreeMan the following year. After working American stages and clubs, he toured European and Asian festivals. Radiant Imprints, a duo outing with drummer Chad Taylor appeared in 2018 and was followed by the quintet offering An UnRuly Manifesto a year later. In 2021, after begin selected as the "Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist" in the Downbeat International Critics Poll, Lewis issued The Jesup Wagon, his debut for Tao Forms.
Lewis was born in Buffalo, New York in 1983. Raised in the church, he was exposed to the aforementioned genres early, and studied music with Carol McLaughlin. He attended the Buffalo Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts. Upon graduation, he continued his studies with Charlie Young at Howard University.
While at Howard, Lewis was able to study and perform with jazz artists including Geri Allen, Benny Golson, Wallace Roney, and Bill Pierce. He was a member of the Howard University Jazz Ensemble that toured Japan under the direction of Fred Irby, and performed at the Kennedy Center Honors backing John Legend, k.d. lang, and Vanessa Williams.
After graduating from Howard in 2006, Lewis moved to Colorado where he became active in the gospel music community, performing with Albertina Walker and other luminaries. He also performed on the WORD television network and won an award for Best Instrumentalist at Dorinda Clark-Cole's singers and musicians conference in 2007.
After establishing himself as a gospel musician, Lewis sought to expand his musical horizons. He attended CalArts, where he studied with Charlie Haden, Wadada Leo Smith, Vinny Golia, and Alphonso Johnson. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2010. Moments, his debut album, was independently issued the same year.
Lewis attended the Banf Jazz Residency where he worked with Dave Douglas, Angelica Sanchez, Joshua Redman, Hank Roberts, and Tony Malaby. It was there that he encountered the dynamic universe of free jazz. He was invited to participate in the Atlantic Center for the Arts residency by pianist Matthew Shipp and made more than an impression. urged on by the pianist and others in the New York jazz community, Lewis relocated to New York City in 2012. He began woodshedding with a host of veteran musicians including Marilyn Crispell, Charles Gayle, Karl Berger, and Eri Yamamoto, to name scant few. He was especially fond of playing with bassist William Parker and drummer Gerald Cleaver.
With the latter two musicians, Lewis released Divine Travels on Sony Masterworks' Okeh imprint in February 2014, and achieved instant acclaim for his ability to embrace and update the sounds of his influences with a unique,utterly contemporary voice. The following year, he issued the conceptual suite Days Of FreeMan for the label, leading a trio composed of drummer Rudy Royston and bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma. The set won international acclaim for the saxophonist's writing as well as his playing, providing Lewis the ability to play the European festival circuit as a bandleader for the first time.
In 2018, Lewis and drummer / percussionist Chad Taylor issued the improvised Radiant Imprints for Belgium's Off label. He also appeared on guitarist Marc Ribot's widely celebrated Songs Of Resistance 1942-2018, the William Hooker-led Pillars ... At The Portal, and on Allen Lowe's Avant Garde Of Our Own: Disconnected Works, 1980 - 2018.
The following year, Lewis issued An UnRuly Manifesto for Relative Pitch Records, leading a quintet that included guitarist Anthony Pirog, trumpeter Jaimie Branch, drummer Warren G. Crudup III, and bassist Luke Stewart. The set drew rave reviews for the finesse in Lewis' playing and canny interactions with Pirog. The same year, Lewis, and the UK rhythm section of bassist John Edwards and drummer Mark Sanders issued the improvised digital outing 4.2.19 on Otoroku. He appeared on saxophonist Michael Eaton's Dialogical, and on the digital Ropeadope issue, Tenor Triage with Eaton and Sean Sonderegger appearing alongside him on saxophones, and the rhythm section of bassist Brad Jones and drummer Calvin Weston.
Though the world was shut down for much of 2020 due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, Lewis' and Taylor's concert performance at Switzerland's annual jazz festival the previous fall as Live In Willisau was released by Intakt, as was the studio quartet outing Molecular with Jones, Taylor, and pianist Aruán Ortiz to debut his new compositional strategy, he dubbed "Molecular Systematic Music." That year Lewis was voted Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist in Downbeat's International Jazz Critics Poll.
Though he couldn't tour, he was able to write and record. Lewis conceived of a suite of compositions inspired by the life and work of George Washington Carver. In the fall of 2020 he assembled the intergenerational Red Lily Quintet -- Taylor on drums, William Parker on bass, Kirk Knuffke on cornet, and Chris Hoffman on cello -- to record it while socially distanced at the Park West Studio in Brooklyn with engineer Jim Clouse and titled The Jesup Wagon after Carver's for first invented vehicle used in the Tuskegee Institute's Movable School program. Author Robin D.G. Kelley stated in his liner notes for the album that on the Jesup Wagon "... Lewis has composed a body of work that captures the essence of Carver's life, work, and vision. A serious student of Carver, Lewis peels back the facade of the old, kindly man conjuring up new uses for peanuts, to reveal the artist, botanist, ecologist, aesthete, musician, teacher, and seer who anticipated our current planetary crisis." The Jesup Wagon was released by Whit Dickey's Tao Forms label in May 2021.
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/jamesbrandonlewis
James Brandon Lewis
Visionary composer and tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis’s bravest, yet most palpable artistic feat, Days Of FreeMan, opens with a poignant and profound introductory monologue from a maternal sage. She says, “The best thing of living is living who you are. You can’t be somebody else; you gotta be what God gave you to be and who you are. You look in the mirror and see yourself and say ‘I’m James Brandon Lewis.”’Next, bass and drums congeal around the sapphire melodic motif of “Brother 1976,” recalling one of those jazzy jewel-like hooks from a 1990s Native Tongue hip-hop jam. The effect is like 1990s hip-hop’s fascination with jazz being spit back by a prodigious jazz innovator. Welcome to Days Of FreeMan.
James Brandon Lewis is one of the modern titans of the tenor. He’s received accolades from mainstream cultural tastemakers such as Ebony Magazine who hailed him as one of “7 Young Players to Watch,” and earned the respect of a diverse cross section of esteemed artists. James has shared stages with such icons as Benny Golson, Geri Allen, Wallace Roney, Grammy® Award-winning singer Dorinda Clark Cole, and the late “Queen of Gospel Music,” Albertina Walker. In bold contrast, James has also worked with such intrepid artists as Weather Report bassist Alphonso Johnson, William Parker, Gerald Cleaver, Charles Gayle, Ed Shuller, Kirk Knuffke, Jason Hwang , Marilyn Crispell, Ken Filiano, Cooper Moore, Darius Jones, Eri Yamamoto, Federico Ughi, Kenny Wessel, Marvin “Bugalu” Smith, and Sabir Mateen. In addition, he has collaborated with the dance company CircuitDebris under the direction of Mersiha Mesihovic. James attended Howard University and holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts.
Currently, James resides in New York City where he actively gigs as a sideman and leads his own ensembles. In NYC, he is a co-founder of “Heroes Are Gang Leaders” with poet Thomas Sayers Ellis—a collective of poets and musicians—and he is a member of the collective “Dark Matter,” a conceptual musical collaboration exploring that which is invisible but is detected by it’s gravitational effects. Outside NYC, James is an active national and international touring artist with a highly respected profile. Some career highlights are playing such esteemed festivals as Winter Jazz Festival /Sony Okeh records Showcase with William Parker and Gerald Cleaver; The Eric Dolphy Festival with an ensemble featuring Grachan Moncur III, Richard Davis, Andrew Cyrille, Angelica Sanchez , Ted Daniel , and Alfred Patterson; and Princeton University as part of Fred Ho’s “Journey to the West,” an interdisciplinary dance and music project.
James is deep in an intrepid artistic continuum that explores identity and spirituality through challenging and awe-inspiring concepts and epiphanic playing that melds formalistic technique, bold exploration, and strains of gospel and blues. Each new James Brandon Lewis release presents a rich dialogue with his audience that is both fiery and cerebral. For his third album, Days Of FreeMan, he uses ideas from 1990s hip-hop to masterfully weave together threads of cultural identity, cross-generational identity, and personal reflection. “I didn’t grow up a hip-hop head, but where I grew up in Buffalo, New York, on Freeman Street, the sound of 1990s hip-hop was ubiquitous,” James says. “I decided to go back and explore that time through music.”
Days Of Freeman is imaginatively organized in chapters with classic hip-hop style breaks and interludes functioning as chapter breathers. Like the cross-cultural and generational mosaic on Freeman Street proper, the album invites the listener into many dialogues. It is a nod to 1990s hip-hop, and explores rhyme-scapes and the musical conventions of that golden age of hip-hop in a revolutionary way. The album also explores hip-hop as a culture through taking inspiration from the original four pillars of hip-hop: dance, rapping, graffiti, and DJ-ing.Days Of FreeMan also loosely functions as a memoir with an underlay of nostalgia for the carefree boyhood days of fly nicknames, basketball, and those first encounters with the transformative power of music. Adding to the power and emotionality of this thread on growing up, are pontifications on love, identity, and God peppered throughout the album, culled from informal conversations James recorded with his grandmother, Pearl Lewis. James’s immersive creative process to realize his vision for Days Of FreeMan include poring over hip-hop documentaries for up to eight hours a day, and dissecting albums by KRS-One, Digable Planets, Pete Rock & CL Smooth, A Tribe Called Quest, Medeski, Martin & Wood, along with fearless jazz trumpeter Don Cherry’s 1985 album Home Boy and Lauryn Hill’s 1998 masterpiece the Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill.
How all of this preparation plays out musically is stunning. For years instrumentalists held fast to the lofty notion of “singing through the instrument,” but on Days Of FreeMan, James aspires to MC through his tenor. The album’s title track perfectly captures the clipped cadence of a master MC with speech-like phrases and a long flowing solo that conjures up a blazing freestyle battle rap session. “Black Ark” traces the legacy of hip-hop from the balmy and pioneering dub explorations of Lee “Scratch” Perry in Jamaica (“Black Ark” is the name of his famed studio) to the burgeoning sounds of hip-hop blaring out in the Bronx. On “Lament for JLew,” in five vigorous minutes James ties together the dual lineages of classical music to hip-hop and classical music to rock using original classical-flavored motifs to illustrate the overlaps.The second to last track of Days Of FreeMan is the political and timely “Unarmed With A Mic” and is a reminder of hip-hop’s power as a form of protest music. On this track James plays with seething sentimentality. The album concludes with “Epilogue,” a reprise of the infectious melody of the opening track “Brother 1976.”
On the album James is accompanied by former Ornette Coleman Prime Time bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Bill Frisell and Ravi Coltrane drummer Rudy Royston. Both took the weighty undertaking of album deeply, researching 1990s hip-hop jams for inspiration and vision. Their attention to the vocabulary of the era James sought to explore, and their panoramic musicality and sympathetic musical skills, match James’s artistic ideal to authentically and thoroughly fuse genres and cultures without pandering to trends in jazz-groove records. The record also features a guest spot from the gifted freestyle rapper Supernatural on the track “Days Of FreeMan.”
Days of FreeMan has turned out to be one James Brandon Lewis’s most ambitious works, and, interestingly enough, his most accessible. Reflecting on this intriguing duality he says: “The artist is charged with taking creative risks, but the universe lined up this time and I was able to connect with my audience conversationally.”
Gear
Selmer Super action 80 series II , Berg Larsen mouth piece
https://www.jblewis.com/who-is-jbl-1
Music
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO HEROES ARE GANG LEADERS
by Piotr Orlov
March 20, 2020
AfroPunk
One of the essential elements of the Black American music experience is how it serves multiple community needs and motivations all at once. Rarely is music just for entertainment or information, purely joyful or mournful, simply jazz or punk or dance or rap. Mostly, it’s an extension of all these, culturally connected and imbued with a multitude of meanings. The richness of the tradition is a part of its creative magnetism and the platform of its purpose — giving it extreme relevance in times of day-by-day living, as well as times of crisis.
Heroes Are Gang Leaders are immersed in the tradition. The band that is big enough to seem a collective was born of a gig that poet Thomas Sayers Ellis and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis had in 2013, as an opening act for the poet Amiri Baraka. When Baraka died a few months later, Ellis and Lewis assembled a crack line-up — bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Ryan Frazier (now Heru Shabaka-ra), pianist/keyboardist Janice Lowe, drummer Warren “Trae” Crudup, and the poet Randall Horton — to record a tribute, what Ellis called “a signifying groove head-nod to Mr. Baraka,” imbuing it with a musical vocabulary lifted off Fats Waller, Thelonious Monk, Chuck Brown, A Tribe Called Quest and a thousand other giants.AUDIO: Artificial Happiness Button
Heroes Are Gang Leaders
3. Hurt Cult
Their work improvised sounds and words and stories (in addition to Ellis’ dramatic recitations and singing by Margaret Morris, other vocal performers piled on in); and as Heroes Are Gang Leaders found their stride as noisy oral historians, the cast of characters and themes of their shows and recordings morphed past Baraka. They praised other great Black poets (Gwendolyn Brooks, Bob Kaufman and Etheridge Knight), on-boarded guest punk musicians (Thurston Moore, Lydia Lunch) and free jazz legends (William Parker), and the core of Heroes expanded, elevating the group’s mighty sound with more horns, bowed strings, and, especially, voices voices voices. (In 2018 they won the American Book Award for Oral Literature.)
On the new Artificial Happiness Button, HAGL’s fifth recording (but its first for the great jazz-groove label Ropeadope), the “band” is a dozen strong, regularly expanding to more than twice that size with guests. Its become an overwhelming, nimble improvisational force, tripping the spectrum between a musical troupe that’s creating a chaotic radio narrative, and a tight funk ensemble — comfortably embodying what the press release calls a “literary jazz band…a version of Funkadelic playing the Archie Shepp song book.” Their oeuvre is a musical wordplay cabaret of Blackness, representing every era, no era and The Era.
One of their primary modes of attack is theatricality, the voices of various Heroes Are Gang Leaders embodying a community of characters, moving the narration from one tempo’d setting to another, like P-Funk on an Ain’t Misbehavin’tip, via 3 Feet High & Rising. This could be a panorama of a timeless Black American space (as on the swinging title track), or a specifically dark, swampy, and blue atmosphere (the Jim Crow terrors and drunk real-life hallucinations of “Mista Slippy”). Poems and sampled voices make way for tight-cropped musical tensions with loose storylines (the instrumental “Hurt Cult” finds “Trae” Crudup working the hi-hat for a spectacular trap beat, as Heru’s trumpet and Janice Lowe’s synth lead a quintet through big wide territory reminiscent of In A Silent Way); or the words return so that storylines can get really specific (the wonderfully titled “It’s the End of the Babysitting of Traumatized Grown Ass Men,” a kind of clueless mea culpa led by a crying Ellis, with a Greek chorus of women snickering and cooing, as the music rises like a mountain and recedes with the tide, over and over). And though amidst its catalog of modern technology-related horrors, the closing “Internet Kill Switch” says nothing about global pandemics — nor gets specific about orange menaces realigning the government with white supremacist policies — it couldn’t be more perfectly positioned to comment on the need to reimagine the world. “It’s time for telepathy! Telepathy!,” says Margaret Morris with the sugared-up voice of a woman pitching something on QVC. “What does it mean to be a human hero? We’re going to find out.”
The traumas, historic and current, are woven through with the jokes and libations required to get past them — or simply survive them. Our heroes have always been gang leaders; only after-the-fact are they sainted, as though they worked within this system built on artificial happiness buttons as social distractions, instead of wanting to tear it the f*ck down. The multiple purposes of this collection of music is to simultaneously help you focus you on this important political fact, while giving you enough musical joyful calories to help keep living through whatever’s going on outside. Now, and after the quarantine.
Heroes Are Gang Leaders
Heroes Are Gang Leaders was founded in 2014 by poet, photographer and professor Thomas Sayers Ellis and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis as a tribute to the late poet, activist, and Jazz Critic Amiri Baraka. Ellis and Lewis opened for Baraka at the St Marks Church (The Poetry Project) in 2013. HAGL is a Literary Free Jazz Ensemble of writers, artists and musicians dedicated to the sound extensions of literary text and original composition. HAGL’s new album, “Artificial Happiness Button”, is its most ambitious to date with the band finding itself in some pretty potent Race Music and literary company.
https://roulette.org/event/residency-james-brandon-lewis-chad-taylor-heroes-are-gang-leaders/
[RESIDENCY]
James Brandon Lewis – Tenor Saxophone
Chad Taylor – Drums, Percussion
Heroes Are Gang Leaders:
Thomas Sayers Ellis – Vocals
Randall Horton – Vocals
Margaret Morris – Vocals
No Land – Vocals
Crystal Good – Spoken Word
Janice Lowe – Vocals, Keyboards
Ryan Frazier – Trumpet
James Brandon Lewis – Tenor Saxophone, Composition
Devin Brahja Waldman – Alto saxophone, Synthesizer
Luke Stewart – Electric Bass
Warren Trae Crudup III – Drums
Roulette artist-in-residence James Brandon Lewis presents Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a program of original and arranged works inspired by John Coltrane, Rashied Ali, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and Ornette Coleman.
The passing of poet Imamu Amiri Baraka in 2014 was a major loss for various facets of Black Radicalism. A strong figure in politics, culture, and community, Baraka inspired many to follow in his footsteps. Formed from the love and respect of Baraka, a group of poets and musicians, led and founded by James Brandon Lewis and Thomas Sayers Ellis, have come together as Heroes Are Gang Leaders. With a name lifted from one of Amiri Baraka’s stories, the group embarked on a recording session last fall that blended poetry and music to “outishly” echo and honor Baraka’s legacy. In the tradition of the protest song, the group’s style combines jazz, groove, black hollerin with extensions of paged and oral literary text by Gwendolyn Brooks, Bob Kaufman, and Baraka himself.
Saxophonist and composer James Brandon Lewis has received accolades from cultural tastemakers such as Ebony Magazine, who hailed him as one of the “7 Young Players to Watch” in 2013. Lewis has shared stages with icons such as Benny Golson, Geri Allen, and Dorinda Clark Cole, as well as Roulette artists Ken Filiano, Darius Jones, and Jason Hwang. Lewis attended Howard University and holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts.
James Brandon Lewis & Chad Taylor is made possible, in part, by the Jerome Foundation.
The Jerome Foundation, a long-time supporter of new works, was a
mainstay in Roulette’s early development. Its steadfast support for more
than 30 years enables us to continue to present exciting, ambitious
compositions by promising emerging artists. Each year, the Jerome
Foundation supports five artist residencies and four commissions at
Roulette.
Tags
Artists: Chad Taylor, Crystal Good, Devin Brahja Waldman, Heroes Are Gang Leaders, James Brandon Lewis, Janice Lowe, Luke Stewart, Margaret Morris, No Land, Randall horton, Ryan Frazier, Thmoas Sayers Ellis, Warren Trae Crudup III
Genres: Improvisation, Jazz, Large Ensemble, Small Ensemble
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/arts/music/james-brandon-lewis-jesup-wagon.html
The New Vanguard
His new album, “Jesup Wagon,” is a tribute to another polymathic figure who insisted on cutting his own path: George Washington Carver.
When James Brandon Lewis plays the saxophone, he usually plants his feet shoulder width apart and bends a bit at the knee, swaying and tunneling into a rhythmic flow. As a bandleader, he almost exclusively performs his own compositions, which have melodies that roam, dart and soar but often stay grounded in a pulse.
Even when the music reaches a cruising speed, Lewis takes his time on the horn, more interested in making sure you get a clear taste of each note than in hurrying along to the next idea. Still, by the end of a song, you’ll feel as though you’ve traveled a good distance with him, put a few dozen miles on the odometer.
“Respect is important to me,” Lewis said on a recent Saturday morning, sitting in the sun at Tompkins Square Park in the East Village and explaining his commitment to clarity.
“There’s always this thing in the background with musicians, like, ‘Can you play?’” he said, referring to the strict meritocratic standards of the jazz bandstand. “But I put that into everything. If I’m going to write an essay, then I’ve got to be able to write well. It’s the same thing with poetry, same thing with teaching myself about visual arts: peeling back those layers.”
Since 2014, when he released “Divine Travels,” his second album, on Sony’s OKeh Records as a relative unknown, Lewis has earned a reputation as a pathfinder in jazz, and a guardian of tradition. Last year he won the rising star tenor saxophonist award in DownBeat magazine’s critics poll, putting an exclamation mark on his ascent.
In an artistically scattered age, when jazz is far too big and contested to be held in place, he has defined his own saxophone lineage — one that runs through Sonny Rollins, David S. Ware and J.D. Allen, constructed around ideals of deep seeking and rhythmic exchange — and kept building.
He’s also been amassing a catalog of poetry, creative essays and manifestoes that crack open some windows into his process. In an essay last year accompanying his album “Molecular,” he wrote: “It is far easier to pick up a drinking glass that is unbroken than one that has been shattered into a million pieces. I prefer the challenge of the latter. No longer capable of holding water, it instead offers a perfect image of freedom and possibility.”
Lewis’s new album, “Jesup Wagon,” out Friday, is a tribute to another polymathic figure who insisted on cutting his own path: the scientist and inventor George Washington Carver. Lewis read biographies about him before composing the seven tracks and two poems that appear on “Jesup Wagon,” and he became moved by how freely Carver had traveled between passions. But he couldn’t help noticing how much his legacy had been pruned by history, reducing Carver to his association with one thing: peanuts.
“He wasn’t a capitalist, in the greater scheme,” Lewis said. Although Carver was an inventor many times over, he added, “He didn’t hardly patent anything.”
At the turn of the 20th century, he took a significant pay cut to start the Tuskegee Institute’s agriculture department, which helped make this prominent Black university into an important research institution. “Jesup Wagon” takes its name from the carriage that Carver drove across the South during his Tuskegee years, conducting demonstrations for poor farmers on how to cultivate their land more sustainably.
This is Lewis’s ninth album as a leader, and his first with the new Red Lily Quintet, featuring Kirk Knuffke on cornet, Christopher Hoffman on cello, William Parker on bass and guimbri, and Chad Taylor on drums and mbira. Lewis generally prefers to play without a chordal instrument behind him, allowing him greater range of motion, and he chose this lineup because he wanted an earthen, folk-like texture, full of rich layering but not the restrictions of chords.
Sometimes elegiac, sometimes bounding forward, the tunes on “Jesup Wagon” are some of the loveliest compositions of his career, built around overlapping ribbons of melody. On “Experiment Station” — its title comes from Carver’s nickname for his lab — an opening section of gesturally bowed strings and legato horns falls into a marching rhythm, led by Taylor’s drums. As Lewis unfurls his solo, the cadence comes apart again, reappearing only occasionally, in moments of fleeting cohesion.
“It’s the same thing with poetry, same thing with teaching myself about visual arts: peeling back those layers.”Credit...Chase Hall for The New York Times
Born in Buffalo in 1983, Lewis is the son of a preacher father and a schoolteacher mother. He was exposed at a young age to a variety of music under the jazz banner, including free improvisation in the Charles Gayle tradition and the svelter disciples of Grover Washington Jr., another famous Buffalonian. What united them all was their attention to rhythmic pulse. “It’s a groove town,” Lewis said.
He picked up the clarinet at age 9, teaching himself to play basic melodies before enrolling at the city’s arts magnet middle school the next year. He studied with Carol McLaughlin and Dave Schiavone, prominent saxophonists and educators in Buffalo, while playing in church. There he found out what it meant for music to brush against the holy spirit, but he also learned the importance of carrying a melody faithfully, in lock step with the choir.
An honor student and an all-county band member, he went on to Buffalo State University before transferring to Howard University in Washington. He graduated with a degree in jazz performance, then spent time living with his father in Colorado, immersing himself in the Denver scene and continuing to play religious music. Then he enrolled at CalArts in Santa Clarita, Calif., where he studied with a faculty teeming with creative music talent, including the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Joe LaBarbera, and his creative identity started to find fuller form.
Through a connection with the pianist Matthew Shipp, Lewis came to the attention of Parker, an important organizer on the New York scene and an esteemed bassist. Lewis invited him and the drummer Gerald Cleaver to make an album; in 2014 it was released as “Divine Travels,” turning heads in the jazz world.
Parker himself was impressed with the way that a young Lewis had seemed to both embody and transcend tradition. “He was prepared to take what he’d learned and forget it,” Parker remembered. “Which to me is always a good sign of a person that’s going to find his own sound.”
Almost a decade after that recording session, Lewis has become an essential part of the creative community surrounding Parker in New York. “I think the James you hear in 2021 will be quite different from the James you hear in 2031,” Parker added. “He’s on the move. And he’s rising up.”
In the mid-2010s, Lewis started playing regularly with a Washington-based rhythm section: the bassist Luke Stewart and the drummer Warren Trae Crudup III. In 2014 all three of them joined the poet Thomas Sayers Ellis in Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a words-and-music ensemble that continues today, and has become a part of Lewis’s creative identity.
He now finds himself not only extending the lineage of his forebears, but attracting their admiration — even emulation. Rollins, 90, widely recognized as jazz’s greatest living improviser, has acknowledged his passion for Lewis’s playing. And J.D. Allen, slightly more than a decade Lewis’s senior and a major source of inspiration, said that he had been turned on his ear by Lewis’s trio with Stewart and Crudup.
Allen said his 2019 trio album, “Barracoon,” which featured a new and younger rhythm section, was directly inspired by the no-holds-barred punk energy of Lewis’s 2016 album, “No Filter.”
“‘Barracoon’ was my attempt to sound like the ‘No Filter’ trio,” Allen said in an interview. He recalled a recent conversation, in which he acknowledged to Lewis that mentorship had given way to exchange: “I told him, ‘I was copying you, man.’”
Articles in this series examine jazz musicians who are helping reshape the art form, often beyond the glare of the spotlight.
James Brandon Lewis and the Red Lily Quintet will play a concert celebrating the release of “Jesup Wagon” on Friday at Roulette at 7 p.m. A free livestream can be viewed at roulette.org.
An earlier version of this article misidentified one of the musicians James Brandon Lewis studied with at CalArts. It was Joe LaBarbera, not Joan La Barbara.
https://jazztimes.com/features/profiles/james-brandon-lewis-bursts-through-the-mire/
James Brandon Lewis Bursts Through the Mire
Science, history, and a former NFL running back inspire the saxophonist to burst through the mire
If the red lily signifies passion, then the melodic acuity and rhythmic dexterity displayed by the James Brandon Lewis Red Lily Quintet seem to have been collected under the proper auspices. For Jesup Wagon, the ensemble’s first recording, Lewis aimed at detailing the nuances of American renaissance man George Washington Carver’s life. And he did. But in the process, the bandleader also revealed portions of his own inner life.
“The story of a lotus or lily, just coming up from the mud, the muck and mire to bloom on the surface—it was my whole thought process and psychologically where I think I am as an artist. I’m from Buffalo, and we’re the underdog,” the saxophonist said in March over Zoom from his home in New York City.
Jesup Wagon follows Lewis’ 2020 Molecular, a quartet date that meditated on the micro-world of science. For this latest effort, though, the bandleader explores Carver’s far more macro innovations, including the titular mobile wagon that he first dispatched to the rural South in 1906 to offer farmers and sharecroppers expert information about agriculture. The back-to-back albums indicate a significant engagement with science, one that seems to be familial.
“My mom was a schoolteacher. She was a science teacher and helped develop science exams for New York State,” Lewis explained. “So I spent time at the Buffalo Museum of Science and around nature. And being around my mom, she kind of cultivated [my interest in] science and my love of music.”
Lewis’ fascination with Carver began as a schoolkid, when he penned an essay on the scientist, inventor, writer, musician, and artist. It’s been lost to time at this point, but slowly peeling back the layers of Carver’s life revealed Lewis’ own variegated practice, one that’s helped him amass credits alongside guitarist Marc Ribot on an album of protest songs and as the orchestrator of melodic material for no-wave progenitor Lydia Lunch. The bandleader also was quick to mention his predilection for abstract expressionism.
“In terms of musicians not being considered artists in the sense of depth … [S]omewhere along the line, we completely forgot that Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington were chillin’ with surrealists in Paris,” Lewis said. “We forget about saying any of that in our stories. Or that George Washington Carver wasn’t just ‘the peanut guy’ and a scientist.”
Adding to his long list of influences, Lewis couched his own playing within a sports metaphor. For inspiration while performing, the saxophonist thinks about former Detroit Lions running back Barry Sanders, an athlete primed enough to stop on a dime and change direction at a moment’s notice. A similar kind of facility is just about essential for the Red Lily Quintet.
The new album’s opening triptych—“Jesup Wagon,” “Lowlands of Sorrow,” and “Arachis”—begins with Lewis alone, deftly moving through octaves of skronky blues phrases before the ensemble kicks in. The second cut’s bucolic shuffle lurches forward, as cornetist Kirk Knuffke takes the spotlight. Bassist William Parker turns to gimbri, imbuing the effort with a slinky feel that emerges occasionally throughout the album; his arco performance on “Arachis,” named after the taxonomic category that includes the peanut, melds with Chris Hoffman’s work on cello, and grants Lewis and drummer Chad Taylor the opportunity to get free.
“One thing that is hard, I think, for musicians is to write in a way that allows the personalities of their band to come out. To give them freedom to play and do what they do,” said Taylor, who’s released a pair of duo recordings with Lewis, over the phone from his Philadelphia home. “What’s remarkable is how James is able to do this, because this is an ensemble that hasn’t played [together] before. You have to have the tools, but you have to arrange them and explain to people what you need them to do—or not to do.”
As Jesup Wagon concludes, Lewis’ troupe moves through his rumbling composition “Chemurgy,” a tune that includes one of the several spoken-word interjections that dapple the recording. Here, the bandleader caps the album with a rumination on the unrelenting determination of a seedling.
“When I think about composing, or how to tell a story, I’m thinking about beginnings, middles, and ends,” Lewis said, detailing Carver’s early years as a sick child, as well as his struggle to be accepted as a Black artist in 19th- and 20th-century America. “Having lived in New York for nine years and having been away from Buffalo since I was 19, I’ve had my own challenges. One thing about being in New York City is, it questions whether you love music. How much do you love it?”
Learn more about Jesup Wagon on Amazon!
https://downbeat.com/reviews/detail/an-unruly-manifesto
James Brandon Lewis An Unruly Manifesto
(Relative Pitch)
by Howard Mandel
February 2019
Downbeat
Tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis’ manifesto, printed on the album’s inside sleeve, presents unruliness as a movement of authenticity and originality pushing against convention and sameness; of knowledge, depth and regard for an “inner harmony of being” over superficiality and pretense. His quintet makes good on this vision with music that’s by turns intriguing, intense, rambunctious, stately and thorny—yet overall welcoming. United in direction, the band sprawls. For neatness, go elsewhere.
Lewis doesn’t abjure structure: His five lengthy pieces here are interspersed with brief interludes. “Year 59 Insurgent Imagination” opens the recording with a spacey guitar pattern, horns entering with sad elegance. And later, three installments of “Pillars,” evidently excerpts of a single outing, recur like dictums, echoes and memories. The plan works, lending contrasts while building power.
But this isn’t a concept album—it’s a work of immediacy and engagement. Without even offhand reference to spirituality, Lewis leads his ensemble down paths of ferocious polyphony that Albert Ayler and John Coltrane took for transcendence. He’s more secular. Peace, for Lewis, seems to be a matter of grappling with issues in the here and now, a grounded aesthetic stance like that of Archie Shepp or Sonny Rollins.
Having released six albums as a leader—including a 2018 collection of duets with drummer Chad Taylor—since his 2010 debut, Lewis is admired for his unselfconsciously brawny sound and expressiveness. Although shrugging off conventions and ideologies, he embraces the legacy of Ornette Coleman, having studied with Charlie Haden, and marks the influence on “Sir Real Denard” and “Haden Is Beauty.” Mindful of these elders, Lewis flies far, high and gutsy, launching from bold themes, strong grooves, minor modes and rich backgrounds. He encourages all involved to blow, shaping episodes from within, culminating in the “Ascension”-like “Escape Nostalgic Prisons.”
Trumpeter Jaimie Branch, on Lewis’ first album featuring another horn player, stays close to him, adding swaggering gestures, bleats, blurts and Don Cherry-esque clarion calls. The rhythm section, a power unto itself, is back from Lewis’ No Filter. Bassist Luke Stewart, while establishing himself, ably evokes Lewis’ past collaborator, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, as well as Haden. Drummer Warren Trae Crudup III’s slap-happy fills drive the ensemble, his busyness a productive goad. Guitarist Anthony Pirog comes up with fascinating backgrounds, wild effects and sweet leads (for instance, at the end of “Notes”).
Lest we forget jazz was forged by breaking norms, An Unruly Manifesto celebrates the aspirations, complications and results of freedom.
An Unruly Manifesto: Year 59 Insurgent Imagination; An Unruly Manifesto; Pillar I: A Joyful Acceptance; Sir Real Denard; The Eleventh Hour; Pillar 2: What Is Harmony; Escape Nostalgic Prisons; Haden Is Beauty; Pillar 3: New Lived, Authority Died. (46:06)
Personnel: James Brandon Lewis, tenor saxophone; Jaimie Branch, trumpet; Luke Stewart, bass; Warren Trae Crudup III, drums; Anthony Pirog, guitar.
Chicago Reader
On his new album, Molecular, Brooklyn saxophonist James Brandon Lewis showcases a vision that’s both microscopic and immense. In the liner notes he describes a compositional model that draws inspiration from the structural components of DNA, comparing the shape of the music to a double helix: “Within a single melodic line emerges a counter line of varied rhythms, pitches, and harmony,” he writes. That image also references the way Lewis’s compositions weave together a world of disparate sources. The members of his quartet thrive on such contrasts, and on Molecular they intertwine feelings of mystery and joy. On the title track, changing tempos create constant surprises; Lewis and pianist Aruán Ortiz complement each other while also conveying different senses of time. Likewise, on “Cesaire,” Lewis layers a heavy tone atop keyboard runs from Ortiz that seem lighter and higher in register. Lewis’s designs also provide for open spaces that are key to the quartet’s constantly shifting emphases, such as the pairing of bassist Brad Jones and drummer Chad Taylor as lead voices on part of “Helix.” Brief forays into spontaneous composition (“Per 1” and “Per 2”) serve as punctuation to this song cycle. Lewis’s tenor style often nods toward classic swing and spirituals, especially on the closing ballad, “Loverly.” He’s delved into this territory before; his other 2020 album, Live in Willisau (a duet with Taylor), includes a reworking of Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday.” But on Molecular his group assemble all these inspirational elements into something entirely original.
https://www.grammy.com/grammys/news/2021-james-brandon-lewis-red-lily-quintet-jesup-wagon-interview
James Brandon Lewis On Evoking George Washington Carver Through Sound, The Wisdom Of Nature & His New Album 'Jesup Wagon'
by Morgan Enos
May 17, 2021
GRAMMYs
Jazz history is full of musicians immortalizing people through sound. John Coltrane did it with "Cousin Mary(opens in a new tab)" and "Syeeda's Song Flute(opens in a new tab)." Miles Davis did it with "Back Seat Betty(opens in a new tab)." Charles Mingus's "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" is a eulogy for the tenor giant Lester Young(opens in a new tab). The problem is that if we couldn't flip over the LP and read about it, we might never know—and tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis is well aware of the gulf between music and PR copy.
While paying homage to agricultural scientist and inventor George Washington Carver on his new album, Jesup Wagon, Lewis conjured his essence and wrenched it from his horn. Even if you might need to read the bio to get who he's driving at, there are more profound forces at play. Even as he interpolated spoken word to illuminating effect, Lewis told a story in a way language never could.
"I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying my best to evoke a deeper thing," he tells GRAMMY.com.
Getting on Carver's wavelength meant digging deeper than the aspects most people learn in public school, like his 300-plus uses for the peanut(opens in a new tab). Lewis more than did his due diligence, poring over Carver's correspondence letters and bulletins for farmers as well as a litany of biographies of the man. Want to read about Carver yourself? There's plenty of literature out there(opens in a new tab). But Jesup Wagon, which came out May 7 on the up-and-coming TAO Forms label, can help you feel his presence.
Far from dry history lessons, Lewis' wrenching compositions like "Lowlands of Sorrow," "Fallen Flowers" and "Experiment Station" may act as first steps to lifelong education on and communion with the historical figure. Most importantly, Lewis has a monstrous sound on the horn. Plus, he has simpatico accompanists in the Red Lily Quintet, which consists of cornetist Kirk Knuffke, bassist and gimbri player William Parker, cellist Chris Hoffman, and drummer and mbira player Chad Taylor.
GRAMMY.com caught up with Lewis over Zoom from Switzerland—where he's already plotting his next album—about his journey through a Black genius's universe and his place in the pantheon of the saxophone.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
You clearly had such a vision for Jesup Wagon, and I can't think of a way you fell short of executing it. How did this idea germinate, and would you consider this album your breakthrough?
Definitely. All the parts kind of fell into place. I definitely didn't have any intention, initially, during this COVID period, to do anything to mark the time period. Just because of personal stuff. Losing family members and different things. Not feeling like creating work was necessarily the right thing to do just because people were losing their lives; people were losing work.
But then, eventually, I was like, "I can't sink my own ship. I've got to be strong for other people." So I just started creating music. This came about very organically. The label reached out—for Whit Dickey to have the courage to start TAO Forms during COVID is like, "OK, cool." [They asked me,] "James, do you have anything?" "Sure, I do."
I'm always creating and thinking about the next thing and the Carver project [and my interest in him] was something that had been on my mind for quite some time. So I thought, "Why not?" Maybe people will gain a little bit more insight into him other than, like, "He's the peanut guy." These kinds of watered-down notions of him. Which happens over time to people. I don't think it's done in a malicious kind of way.
And then, the cast. It's everyone that I've worked with over the years. I've only worked with Chris Hoffman once, but that was good enough. It's interesting because when you create, you don't know what the response is going to be. I thought, "This sounds like some pretty good music," and I put my best foot forward with every project, but you don't know which project is going to resonate with people the most.
I'm sure you've done innumerable interviews about George Washington Carver at this point. I'm interested in the tension between the music and the press kit—how you can evoke someone through sheer sound without necessitating that the listener read the one-sheet.
For me, it was a natural process. The older I get, the more I reflect on my past. Just growing up and being interested in many different things. Reading Emerson, being interested in science and jazz. I was just this kind of kid. Now, as an adult, the most authentic or original ideas I can pull from have to be from thinking about my own personal experiences.
In two years, I'll be 40. I think I have a little bit of life that I can talk about. So I think in choosing to do any project, I'm fully immersing myself in being in history. Checking out the bulletins he made for farmers. Checking out several different biographies as well as correspondence letters. Seeing clips of him on YouTube. Fully immersing myself gets me in tune with a little of his vibe.
The more I dig in, the more I feel like it may translate. How it resonates in my soul, I can map that and remember that feeling and then pick up my horn and proceed to play, remembering the feeling of a passage he said or his exchanges with Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee [Institute].
All of these different things and also the idea of him going against the grain in science when that's not necessarily the field [where] you're supposed to go against the grain. You're supposed to be all factual. He's presenting spirituality and telling people he's talking to the plants and they're letting him know what's going on.
It's always a challenge when you're playing music. To have a concept and then [wonder], "OK, well, it's instrumental music. Does it translate?" I think when you immerse yourself in a topic … It's no different than if I was writing a piece and I wanted to evoke, maybe, what love feels like. That's just knowing the characteristics of how to paint emotion with particular sounds.
That's up to the listener, but I feel like I'm in tune with his spirit, with his vibe. As you say, away from any PR or whatever. Any of the PR or any of the things that are out there is stuff that I've disseminated about him in the most truthful way. It's just like my dealings with Robin D. G. Kelly [who wrote a 2009 biography of [Thelonious Monk.] He's such an amazing writer. I've had a relationship with him since, like, 2016, when my No Filter project came out with my trio.
He was familiar with the process of me choosing titles and knowing that the titles were not just random. They kind of guide you. He was able to depict the titles in a really beautiful way that is truthful. They're based on me reading his correspondence letters and checking out his documents. A lot of real research.
The music is one aspect, but to firmly immerse yourself in something is another thing. I could easily come up with a song and call it "The Peanut"; I don't know if that would be that interesting. I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying my best to evoke a deeper thing. The musicians help that, too. It's not a bad crew to work with!
It's a co-creation. You've got the best minds on it! And I think I understand now. You don't need to be able to materialize a person, somehow. You're not writing a book. You're just manifesting Carver's essence in an emotional or spiritual way.
Right. Does it relate to someone on an emotional level? Even when I'm listening to it—which I rarely do after I record it—I go, "Yeah." If I hear "Experiment Station," just visualizing George Washington Carver with students, the newness, the childlike behavior of discovery [mimics exuberant melody] then it's like "Wow, this is about to take me somewhere." It's also just about the contour of the line and how you shape things. Descending, the overall arc of things.
Hey, if it can also reach people emotionally—I'm at a place now where I'm like, "Let me play it for my family." If it resonates with them, then, cool. I think I'm OK. I'm on the right track. If Grandma's movin' and groovin', then that's a good sign.
How did Kelley come into your life? What a great asset.
I had released [No Filter] on a small label called BNS Sessions. He just reached out to me and said he enjoyed the album, and we sparked up a friendship. I also got involved with reading other books he was involved in, [like 2009's] Black, Brown & Beige, which was a surrealist anthology that he edited. That book specifically was influential on the UnRuly Manifesto(opens in a new tab) project I did in 2019.
It's just been a healthy exchange. He's been to some of my gigs. We just sparked a real vibe. I'm thankful. He wrote some ace liner notes.
What tools were in your toolbox while making Jesup Wagon? Which artists were swimming through your mind?
I think I naturally draw from the canon of great saxophone players, just because I listen to them. But for this sound and vibe—I initially wanted to have a kora player on this project. That didn't quite work out, but then, I said, "OK, William Parker plays the gimbri. Chad Taylor plays the mbira. If I get a cello, then we have this earthy [quality]."
Me and Kirk [Knuffke], we definitely have similar interests in terms of all the great Ornette Coleman vibes and tunes. Just the way he plays and I play and we interact with each other, that's definitely a headspace in the ether. Strings, horns, no harmonic instrument, drums.
I definitely feel like I'm in the lineage of a lot of different players, but I don't know if I was thinking of that, necessarily, other than trying to convey the music in a way that felt connected to the tradition. The Coltranes, the Aylers. The Ornette Colemans. The Dewey Redmans. That vibe. Julius Hemphill. All these folks who have these different ensembles. The cello and bass.
My introduction to cello happened in 2009. I was at Banff [International Workshop in Jazz & Creative Music] and I met [cellist] Hank Roberts, who plays with Bill Frisell. And then, later on, I met [composer and cellist] Tomeka Reid when I got to New York. It was a natural progression of sounds.
And then, William Parker! He's also a huge influence [on my] sound. He's had a lot of different ensembles with a lot of different kinds of instruments and things. And Chad Taylor, who's worked with Pharoah Sanders and [tenor saxophonist] Fred Anderson. I think there is a sound universe. I definitely feel like I lean toward a lot of different influences.
All in all, you may not be able to build a person out of sound, but you can push a hole in the universe and something might come out the other side. Who knows how Jesup Wagon will cause a ripple effect in global awareness of Carver and his contributions?
You know, it's interesting, because I've had different people from Alabama, from the South, who listened to the record, and they're like, "Wow. You really evoked this. We knew Carver when we were kids, growing up in this specific area. This is amazing." That's always a really cool thing. It's nice.
It also manifests itself, because I was just a kid who was curious about this individual, as I am with many other people. We'll see what happens, but I'm glad people dig the music. I don't think this is just a one-time [thing]. I don't know if I'm creating Carver, Part Two, but I will continue to study him. It's manifesting in my own life. He, as an individual, definitely got me thinking about nature. Maybe [making me] a little more concerned with nature as opposed to "This is over here and I'm separate from it and I'm so sophisticated." Caring about it, thinking about it. Contributing to it in a way that's healthy.
Maybe a seed is growing inside me to get some plants of my own and appreciate them. Especially during this time period, it seems like nature is the most calm and sophisticated and knows how to conduct itself.
https://somethingelsereviews.com/2020/10/08/james-brandon-lewis-quartet-molecular-2020/
James Brandon Lewis Quartet – ‘Molecular’ (2020)
October 8, 2020
James Brandon Lewis is a scholar. Of course, as a saxophonist, composer and bandleader, he’s a student of music, but he also takes an active interest in agricultural biology (George Washington Carver), molecular biology (James D. Watson), science fiction (Isaac Asimov) and visual arts (Wassily Kandinsky). All of these fields of interest and more inform his music, influenced from that world by such high authorities as Leonard Bernstein and his former mentor Charlie Haden.
Lewis distills his avid interests in these fields into a vision for each of his projects: Divine Travels is an ode to spiritualism where he introduced his “enclosed” rhythmic system, while An Unruly Manifesto was dedicated in part to surrealism. For his latest product, Molecular uses the double helix DNA component structure as a compass to guide for Lewis’ own harmonic map, and to help him fulfill this new blueprint, Lewis put together a whole new band.
Pianist Aruán Ortiz, bassist Brad Jones and drummer Chad Taylor are all respected leaders in their own right and have a ton of experience as sidemen for jazz visionaries. They can handle whatever Lewis throws at them and make it better staying within their own unique characteristics.
But back to this idea of applying the structural components of DNA to composition. What this all comes down to layman’s terms is that Lewis can create a structure where freedom can thrive. Just take a listen to “A Lotus Speaks,” an interesting, circular theme that Lewis takes outside and the whole band comes along, but easily returning to resolve the whole thing with a variation on that theme. “Of First Importance” is not just some pretty ballad, there’s forward motion that brings it from one point to another, and the enjoyment you get from it lies in that journey.
Another aspect that sets Molecular apart from just a ‘solid’ jazz record is a special group dynamic amongst guys who love to take chances and willing to take roads lass traveled. Lewis makes the 6/8 flow of “Molecular” integral to the melody, and Jones’ harmonic complement on bass gives it a nice groove, fertile ground for Ortiz and Lewis to solo over. “An Anguish Departed” smolders over a rhumba rhythm where Lewis doesn’t even enter until halfway through, but until then Ortiz is holding down the fort forcefully, displaying a unique, confident style that perfectly parallels the leader’s. “Loverly” is a delicate closing, and Jones steps up front to render a soul-probing passage.
Lewis has established his own language on the saxophone, and it’s not just note choice, but in the small yet impactful ways he plays them. He rockets out the gate for the advanced bop exercise “Helix” but what’s notable in that even in an animated state, he puts so much nuance in his notes, at one point smudging them. “Cesaire” has a Cuban feel, which suits Cuban-born Ortiz just fine, but it’s also an occasion for Lewis to play with Latin-sized passion, throwing in tantalizing hints of late-period Coltrane for the final flourish. A longer expression of this kind of passion is heard on “Neosho,” bolstered by Ortiz’s on-point comping. Lewis’ “Breaking Code” isn’t the same as Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” in structure, but possesses much of the same wistful sentiment, and his saxophone’s vibrato underscores this.
There was quite an amount of intellectual inspiration that went to the making of Molecular, but in the end, it’s really not that important to understand the non-musical, cerebral sources for the material. Lewis himself realized this: “Is the system present? Can you hear a system? And then I realized, who cares? It’s a good record.”
A very good record.
Molecular will drop in CD form on October 16, 2020 from Intakt Records. Get a download now from Bandcamp.
http://giantstepsmusic.org/our-approach/jb-lewis/
James Brandon Lewis
Tenor Sax | USA
Acclaimed saxophonist and composer James Brandon Lewis has received accolades from The New York Times, NPR and Ebony Magazine, who hailed him as one of the “7 Young Players to Watch” in today’s scene. Lewis has shared stages with such icons as Geri Allen, Benny Golson, Wallace Roney, GRAMMY Award-winning singer Dorinda Clark Cole, and intrepid artists including William Parker, Hamiet Bluiett, Hamid Drake, Ravi Coltrane, Jimmy Heath, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Joe Lovano , Dave Douglas, and many others .
Lewis has released three albums as a leader. On his latest, Days of FreeMan. Lewis “makes it sound natural to play roaming, experimental funk” (The New York Times) by drawing inspiration and re-interpreting the sound foundations of 1990s hip-hop. He is a co-founder of “Heroes Are Gang Leaders” with poet Thomas Sayers Ellis—a collective of poets and musicians—and a member of the collective “Dark Matter,” a conceptual musical collaboration exploring that which is invisible but is detected by it’s gravitational effects. Lewis attended Howard University and holds a Master of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts.
Jazz meets poetry with Heroes Are Gang Leaders at Blues Alley
