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https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2021/07/james-brandon-lewis-b-1983-outstanding_0400896426.html
PHOTO: JAMES BRANDON LEWIS (b. August 13, 1983)
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/james-brandon-lewis-mn0002545948#biography
James Brandon Lewis
(b. 1983)
Biography by Thom Jurek
Jazz player James Brandon Lewis is a New York-based tenor saxophonist, composer, and bandleader. His instrumental voice marries the emotional power of gospel and 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, Lewis' 2010 debut, was followed by two 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 and played European and Asian festivals. Radiant Imprints, a duo outing with drummer Chad Taylor, appeared in 2018 and was followed by the quintet album An Unruly Manifesto a year later. In 2021, after being selected a Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist in the Downbeat International Critics Poll, Lewis formed the Red Lily Quartet to record Jesup Wagon, his breakthrough album. The live, digital-only MSM Molecular Systematic Music followed in 2022. His regular quartet released Eye of I for Anti- in March 2023. Lewis followed it in September by releasing For Mahalia, With Love, an album-length tribute to the iconic gospel singer performed by Red Lily Quintet. In 2024, Lewis released a collaborative album with the Washington, D.C.-based experimental rock trio the Messthetics.
Lewis was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1983. Raised in the church, he was exposed to gospel, blues, and R&B early on, and studied music with Carol McLaughlin. He attended the Buffalo Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts, and upon graduation 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, which 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.
Once he had established 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 Banff 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 a 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 Okeh 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 Jews & Roots: An Avant Garde of Our Own -- Disconnected Works, 1980-…. Lewis released An UnRuly Manifesto for Relative Pitch Records in 2019, 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 his canny interactions with Pirog. The same year, Lewis and the U.K. 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-released Tenor Triage, with saxophonists Eaton and Sean Sonderegger appearing alongside him with 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 was released as Live in Willisau by Intakt, as was the studio quartet outing Molecular with Jones, Taylor, and pianist Aruán Ortiz. To debut his new compositional strategy, Lewis dubbed the album "Molecular Systematic Music." That year, he was voted Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist in Downbeat's International Jazz Critics Poll.
Though he couldn't tour in 2020, Lewis was able to write and record. He 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. Titled Jesup Wagon after the Carver-invented vehicle used in the Tuskegee Institute's Movable School program, the album was released by Whit Dickey's Tao Forms label in May 2021. It was greeted by universal acclaim from critics and musicians and again placed in the year's end list of best recordings by Downbeat. Saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins, one of Lewis' greatest influences, was bowled over by it and told him: "When I listen to you, I listen to Buddha, I listen to Confucius...I listen to the deeper meaning of life. You are keeping the world in balance."
Lewis issued the live, kinetic MSM Molecular Systematic Music in 2022 on Intakt. A quartet album, it again featured Taylor as well as pianist Aruan Ortiz and bassist Brad Jones. In February 2023, Lewis released Eye of I, his debut album for indie Anti-. He was signed to the label after guitarist Marc Ribot actively encouraged Anti's A&R team on his behalf (Lewis appeared with the guitarist live and on his widely acclaimed Songs of Resistance 1942-2018). The saxophonist's outing pared down his ensemble down to a trio with Chris Hoffman on electric cello and pedals and Max Jaffe on drums. In early January, a four-track pre-release titled "Send Seraphic Beings" for the album's single appeared. The other tunes -- also drawn from the album -- included the originals "The Blues Still Blossoms" and "Fear Not (featuring the Messthetics)." Both the album and single also included Lewis' stirring cover of Donny Hathaway's "Someday We'll All Be Free." In September, For Mahalia, With Love appeared on Whit Dickey's Tao Forms label with the Red Lily Quintet. The track list comprised spirituals long associated with Jackson. Her impact on the development of gospel music was paramount: she influenced virtually every gospel singer who came after her. Further, she employed spirituals in concert to participate in and support the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s.
Lewis had collaborated on several occasions with guitarist Anthony Pirog, recording a few tracks with Pirog's group the Messthetics, an adventurous experimental rock band featuring Joe Lally and Brendan Canty of Fugazi. In March 2024, Lewis and the Messthetics issued a collaborative album, The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, which was released by Impulse. Recorded in just two days, the music was a bracing meeting between the power of rock and the exploratory imagination of jazz.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/james-brandon-lewis
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
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.
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
Poetry and jazz aren’t strange bedfellows. Amiri Baraka regularly performed with jazz accompaniment at Bohemian Caverns. Rarely has a collective of multiple poets and musicians taken to D.C. stages in recent years, however — and even in more distant years there surely weren’t many concerts like the one Heroes Are Gang Leaders put on at Blues Alley on Tuesday night. It was something like poetry and jazz as directed by Spike Lee.
“This is, let’s say, literary free jazz,” poet and co-founder Thomas Sayers Ellis said as he and nine other people filled the bandstand. A very soft soul groove took shape, courtesy of guitarist Brandon Moses, bassist Luke Stewart, pianist Jenna Camille and tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis.
“Good morning, Blues Alley!” exclaimed vocalist Crystal Good, just as trumpeter Heru Shabaka-Ra joined in. “Happy birthday!”
If it was incongruous, Good and co-vocalist Nettie Chickering soon explained in singing unison: “Don’t believe everything that you sing.”
Good and Chickering were only two of four vocalists on the bandstand. The other two, Ellis and poet Randall Horton, injected big personalities into the mix. Horton strutted and wiggled in place like a member of a Motown revue; Ellis danced with broader, jerkier motions, as though imitating an exercise routine. Their vocals were equally outsize, a mix of sermonizing and spoken-word performance. On the second tune, “Mister Sippi,” they formed something of a skit. Ellis imitated a lurching drunk, then he and Horton began exchanging lines about drinking: “Johnny Walker Red!” “I ain’t got Jack!” “Number seven, number seven!” “Twist the cap!”
“If you wish you wasn’t tipsy, raise your hand!” Ellis intoned, then fell to calling out the titles of William Faulkner novels.
Such was the evening’s tone. The music wasn’t as chaotic as “literary free jazz” sounds. It was quite tonal — Stewart and drummer Trae Crudup laying down smart, funky lines (with Stewart playing some guitarlike flourishes that Moses, of course, augmented) while Lewis, Shabaka-Ra and alto saxophonist Devin Brahja Waldman chattered melodically on top.
The poets-vocalists were equally engaged in funky counterpoint jams. This was a problem. The vocals tended to get lost or muddied in the instrumentalists’ blare. Only phrases were discernible — though that was often enough. When poet Samantha Riott sat in for the fourth and final tune, “Absolute,” phrases were her stock in trade. They were aggressive, most not fit for a newspaper — but capped by a sardonic, “Does this sound like poetry yet?”
Even with that sonic blur, though, the performance — Ellis called it “a surrender to the art form” — was exhilarating, original and refreshing, an extension of the 1970s Black Consciousness movement.
“That was interesting,” an audience member said outside the club afterward. “That was different.”
https://avantmusicnews.com/2021/05/18/james-brandon-lewis-profiled/
James Brandon Lewis ProfiledMay 18, 2021 ~ Mike
Source: Bandcamp Daily.The third track on James Brandon Lewis’ Jesup Wagon is titled “Arachis”—the scientific name of the peanut plant—which is as close as the tenor saxophonist’s tribute to George Washington Carver gets to the scientist’s most famous association.
Lewis is a rather remarkable person himself. The Buffalo native’s second album, 2014’s avant-garde-leaning Divine Travels, left a searing imprint on the jazz world, and established Lewis as a musician bursting with promise. In his meteoric rise since then, he has made good on that promise, taking various aesthetic and conceptual approaches that share a loose, experimental edge: not totally free, but—as the title of his 2019 album attests—unruly. Lewis has enriched it with his own poetry and inspiration from his studies of visual arts and science (his mother was a science teacher, and Lewis has long been fascinated with biology and nature).
Recorded over a three-year period at the longtime Fast Speaking Music Home of poet Anne Waldman by her son, musician and engineer Ambrose Bye, in New York City,
Artificial Happiness Button finds HAGL in search of new and original ways to combine Poetry and Jazz. For this project they move away from the literary canon to turn inward, courageously and humorously reaching, aesthetically and politically, beneath and beyond the manufactured Problem Reaction Solution Movements of Social Justice to reinvigorate the tradition of Jazz Poetry.
With its longtime lineup of poets, musicians and artists James Brandon Lewis, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Margaret Morris, Randall Horton, Luke Stewart, Heru Shabaka-ra, Devin Brahja Waldman, Brandon Moses, Warren "Trae" Crudup, Janice Lowe, HAGL is joined by new members Melanie Dyer, Jenna Camille, Nettie Chickering and Bonita Lee Penn as well as featured guests such as the legendary bassist William Parker, Jaimie "Breezy" Branch on trumpet and Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña. A wake up call for 2020, Artificial Happiness Button is unflinching in its ability to take on such topics as the built-in earthly ceiling of human joy, the truth tug of war that occurs in personal relationships, the addictive effects of bottled racism in literature and the American South, mechanized widespread programmed hurt and the deadly electronic net of one-hive info sharing. This new offering from Heroes Are Gang Leaders is a timely and prophetic tour de force aimed at giving back all of the false aspects of the globe (and local globalism) while rescuing the real ones.
For info and costs please contact Alberto Lofoco
• projects as a leader/co-leader •
James Brandon Lewis & Chad TaylorJames Brandon Lewis - tenor sax
Chad Taylor - drums and mbira
James Brandon Lewis Trio
James Brandon Lewis - tenor sax and composition
Luke Stewart - electric bass
Warren Trae Crudup III - drums
The Dead Lecturers
"Baby Lonely Iambs" or "Worry-Nation Cycle Liberation" (with a tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat)
Thomas Sayers Ellis - spoken word
James Brandon Lewis - tenor sax
Melanie Dyer - viola or Alexis Marcelo - piano
Founded in 2012 by James Brandon Lewis and Thomas Sayers Ellis, three years before their
larger ensemble Heroes Are Gang Leaders, The Dead Lecturers is an improvisational exchange
between units of sound and units of language with the goal of stimulating, within the listener,
new ideas of action and non-passive living. Ellis and Lewis have a unique chemistry of
agreeing and disagreeing with one another while delivering a potent, creative messages that
extend the "Black Literary Oral Tradition".
James Brandon Lewis - tenor sax and composition
Aruán Ortiz - piano and percussion
Brad Jones - double bass
Chad Taylor - drums
James Brandon Lewis "Red Lily Quintet"
Kirk Knuffke - cornet
James Brandon Lewis - tenor sax and composition
Christopher Hoffman - cello
Silvia Bolognesi - double bass
Chad Taylor - drums
Heroes Are Gang Leaders
Thomas Sayers Ellis - spoken word
James Brandon Lewis - tenor sax and composition
with:
Randall Horton - spoken word
Bonita Penn - spoken word
Nettie Chickering - vocalist
Melanie Dyer - vocalist and viola
Heru Shabaka-Ra - trumpet
Devin Brahja Waldman - alto sax & synthesizer
Brandon Moses - electric guitar
Jenna Camille - vocals, piano and keyboards
Luke Stewart - electric bass
Warren Trae Crudup III - drums
• video •
Video of
James Brandon Lewis on YouTube
James Brandon Lewis' Red Lily Quintet: "Jesup Wagon" live at Roulette - Brooklyn (31-1-2018)
James Brandon Lewis & Chad Taylor "Imprints" live at PointCulture - Charleroi (31-1-2018)
James Brandon Lewis & Chad Taylor at 6BC Gardens - Arts for Art, NYC (2-10-2016)
Heroes Are Gang Leaders at JazzFest Berlin (31-10-2017)
Heroes Are Gang Leaders at Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Heroes Are Gang Leaders "The Day We Gave the Globes Back, A Sing Along!" @ Issue's 22 Boerum Theater
Thomas Sayers Ellis - James Brandon Lewis - Nothing Personal - Part 4 (12-12-2013)
James Brandon Lewis Trio - at Sonic City (11-11-2017)
James Brandon Lewis Trio live at Villa Nachini-Cabassi - Corno di Rosazzo (27-10-2017)
James Brandon Lewis Trio - at Not A Police State / Arts For Art (5-1-2016)
James Brandon Lewis' Lotus - at NYC Free Jazz Summit / Arts for Art (5-4-2016)
• discography •
2021 - Jesup Wagon
- Red Lily Quiintet with Kirk Knuffke, Christopger Hoffman, William Parker, Chad Taylor
2020 - Molecular
- with Aruán Ortiz, Brad Jones, Chad Taylor
2020 - Live in Willisau
- with Chad Taylor
2019 - An UnRuly manifesto
- with Jaimie Branch, Anthony Pirog, Luke Stewart, Warren "Trae" Crudup
2018 - Radiant Imprints
- with Chad Taylor
2016 - No Filter
- with Luke Stewart, Warren "Trae" Crudup, P.SO the Earth Tone King, Anthony Pirog and Nicholas Ryan Gant
2015 - Days of Freeman
- with Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Rudy Royston, Pearl Lewis, Supernatural HPrizm
2014 - Divine Travels
- with William Parker, Gerald Cleaver and Thomas Sayers Ellis
2010 - Moments
- with Neil Kogan, Robert Holliday, Ben Shepherd, John Shebalin
• interviews •
James Brandon Lewis Pushes Genre Boundaries with "Days of Freeman" by Andrew Rodriguez - Jazz Vibes (13-8-2015)
• texts •
All Elders be Eloquence, or One Way to Pay Dem You Owe - On Recording the track "Sad Dictator"Amiri's Green Chim Chim-knees Growth Tribe
James Brandon Lewis Takes Two
James Brandon Lewis
Voted Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist in the 2020 Down Beat Magazine International Critic’s Poll, James Brandon Lewis supercharges his remarkable evolution on the New York jazz scene with Jesup Wagon, a brilliant and evocative appreciation of the life and legacy of turn-of-the-19th century African-American renaissance man George Washington Carver. The album, to be released on TAO Forms on May 7, 2021, consists of seven pieces that taken together create a portrait of stunning clarity and depth.
There
is so much special about this recording, James’ eighth, starting with
the lavish artwork, including a reproduction on the cover of Carver’s
own tantalizing drawing of the Jesup Agricultural Wagon, which is shown
in a photograph on the rear cover, rendering a dialogue of
representation and abstraction that Lewis models in the music. And while
liner notes are generally more relied upon than celebrated, Jesup Wagon’s are delivered by the great UCLA American historian Robin D.G. Kelley, who in 2009 released the definitive Thelonious Monk biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.
His notes, printed lovingly on an ochre background, contain much
historical detail about Carver, particularly as they relate to the
tunes. The fact that Kelley was willing to write them tells you
something about the power of the music on the album, which Kelley calls
“a revelation.”
If “revelation” is a word commonly used to
describe master saxophonists like John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Pharoah
Sanders and Dewey Redman, then it fits easily in the horn of James
Brandon Lewis, who is a keen student of those and many other elders. But
while boundless energy characterizes his playing, it is also grounded
by a deep sense of narrative, which is why he is attracted to histories,
like Carver’s, or to theories like his own Molecular Systematic Music,
used on his superb previous 2020 Intakt album, Molecular, or to artistic genres such as surrealism, modeled by Lewis on An UnRuly Manifesto from 2019.
James
Brandon Lewis Continues To Shatter Expectations on Powerful New Quintet
Set, Jesup Wagon (TAO Forms), Paying Homage to George Washington
Carver, with Liner Notes by the Noted Historian Robin D.G. Kelley
Album Features:
James Brandon Lewis (tenor saxophone, composition)
Kirk Knuffke (cornet), Chris Hoffman (cello),
William Parker (bass, gimbri), Chad Taylor (drums, mbira)
AVAILABLE MAY 7th FROM TAO FORMS
LP (deluxe gatefold sleeve) / CD (deluxe digipak)
DL (w/ extensive digital booklet)
Photo: Diane Allford
“There’s
no easy shorthand for James Brandon Lewis’ musical M.O. Ever since his
early releases...the saxophonist has balanced a deep, gospel-informed
spirituality with free-jazz abandon and hard-hitting funk-meets–hip-hop underpinnings.”
--Hank Shteamer, Rolling Stone
Voted Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist in the 2020 Down Beat Magazine International Critic’s Poll, James Brandon Lewis supercharges his remarkable evolution on the New York jazz scene with Jesup Wagon, a brilliant and evocative appreciation of the life and legacy of turn-of-the-19th century African-American renaissance man George Washington Carver. The album, to be released on TAO Forms on May 7, 2021, consists of seven pieces that taken together create a portrait of stunning clarity and depth.
There is so much special about this recording, James’ eighth, starting with the lavish artwork, including a reproduction on the cover of Carver’s own tantalizing drawing of the Jesup Agricultural Wagon, which is shown in a photograph on the rear cover, rendering a dialogue of representation and abstraction that Lewis models in the music. And while liner notes are generally more relied upon than celebrated, Jesup Wagon’s are delivered by the great UCLA American historian Robin D.G. Kelley, who in 2009 released the definitive Thelonious Monk biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. His notes, printed lovingly on an ochre background, contain much historical detail about Carver, particularly as they relate to the tunes. The fact that Kelley was willing to write them tells you something about the power of the music on the album, which Kelley calls “a revelation.”
If “revelation” is a word commonly used to describe master saxophonists like John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and Dewey Redman, then it fits easily in the horn of James Brandon Lewis, who is a keen student of those and many other elders. But while boundless energy characterizes his playing, it is also grounded by a deep sense of narrative, which is why he is attracted to histories, like Carver’s, or to theories like his own Molecular Systematic Music, used on his superb previous 2020 Intakt album, Molecular, or to artistic genres such as surrealism, modeled by Lewis on An UnRuly Manifesto from 2019.
“How can you convey these things with just sound?” Lewis asks. “I’m not interested in going into the studio just for the sake of recording. How do you make music have a sound image? All these things I’m interested in are innate in my being.”
Helping James get it all out on Jesup Wagon is the Red Lily Quintet, anchored by the tectonic rhythm section of bassist William Parker and drummer Chad Taylor, and rounded out by cornetist Kirk Knuffke and cellist Chris Hoffman. Parker, who James says “has looked out for me ever since I arrived in New York City,” is a genius of the stand-up bass who performed with grandmaster Cecil Taylor for 11 years straight. He is also a renaissance man in his own right. Chad Taylor, “one of the most melodic drummers I’ve ever played with,” James says, is a Chicagoan who has gifted to New York some of the energy and drama the windy city is known for. Kirk Knuffke, is one of New York’s rare cornet players, using that instrument’s impish tone to explosive effect on dozens of records by New York jazz heavies. Chris Hoffman made his bones playing Henry Threadgill’s demanding music in a few of the great alto saxophonist’s bands, and has worked with artists as diverse as Yoko Ono, Marc Ribot and Marianne Faithful.
James grew up in Buffalo, which he calls a “groove town” of “hard workers” like Grover Washington Jr., Charles Gayle, Rick James, and Ani DiFranco, among them. Starting out on clarinet when he was 9, James moved to alto sax at 12 then tenor at 15. He attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. where he studied jazz fundamentals, then enrolled at Cal Arts in Southern California, working with greats like Wadada Leo Smith, Charlie Haden, and Joe LaBarbara. Notching his MFA there, he did a residency at the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music where he worked with trumpeter Dave Douglas, pianist Angelica Sanchez and saxophonist Tony Malaby, among others. It was in Banff where he dove into the world of free jazz, continuing in that vein at an Atlantic Center for the Arts residency led by iconic New York City pianist Matthew Shipp.
“Matthew got me playing without a piano or a guitar,” says James. “That set me on a tear. I could just follow a melodic line without any harmonic constraints.”
Shipp and a few others lured him to New York City in 2012, where he quickly fell in with the cutting-edge artists, including drummer Gerald Cleaver and William Parker, that populate the jazz scene there. His second album, Divine Travels, released in 2014, featured the latter two musicians. Two albums he made in duets with Chad Taylor – Radiant Imprints (2018) and Live in Willisau (2020) – demonstrated that James had no hesitation dancing on the same wild turf that John Coltrane entered with his latter-day records featuring Rashied Ali on drums, although James says the inspiration was more Dewey Redman and Ed Blackwell’s duet, Red and Black in Willisau, recorded live in 1980. “Chad and I bonded over that one,” James says. Either way, it’s heady company.
Lewis also has an affinity for the spoken word, demonstrated on Jesup Wagon by a few timely placed short recitations. “Music is enough. But the older I get it’s important for me to have the listener hear my speaking voice,” he says. “Makes it more organic. I like to tell a story with an album.”
Poetry is just one of Lewis’ many obsessions, which also include painting, hip-hop and philosophy. “All of the people I admire have that kind of depth,” Lewis says. “William Parker, Oliver Lake, Yusef Lateef, all these amazing artists. George Washington Carver was a musician, a painter, a prolific writer, in addition to what most people know about him. Having a broad range just makes the cast iron skillet more seasoned.”
And now, in our pandemic era, James delivers Jesup Wagon, essentially a collection of tone poems – or, as Duke Ellington might have called them, “tone parallels” -- Duke being the instigator of this type of programmatic jazz.
Poetry in music is what we get in this new masterpiece from James Brandon Lewis, who looks to be crowned a master himself in the not-too-far future.
RELEASE DATE: May 7th, 2021
PUBLICITY CONTACT: Matt Merewitz / Fully Altered Media / matt@fullyaltered.com / +1-215-629-6155
© 2021 Fully Altered Media
The Unstoppable James Brandon Lewis
AllAboutJazz
"I have a fear and that is becoming complacent, which is why I am always studying and pushing things further. I also have a healthy relationship with being curious. If you're curious you can never become complacent and if you're complacent you will never desire to be curious."—James Brandon Lewis
Hailing from Buffalo, New York, Lewis apprenticed at Howard University, CalArts, the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, among other launching pads, before he moved to New York City full time almost a decade ago. As Lewis writes, "Like my predecessors—John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler—I, as a saxophonist and composer in a direct lineage of sound painters, am attempting to deconstruct widely accepted approaches to musical form, theory, and performance practice in favor of an individualized music rooted in abstraction."
His releases themselves are highly "individualized." 2020 saw the release of two albums from Intakt Records, Live in Willsau a co-release with drummer Chad Taylor that documented the duo's incendiary performance at the 2019 Willisau Jazz Festival, and Molecular, a quartet album led by Lewis that uses his concept of Molecular Systematic Music—which he discusses in this interview—as a template for his compositions. His latest, and ninth, album, Jesup Wagon (TAO Forms, 2021), featuring his all-star Red Lily Quintet, interprets the legacy of George Washington Carver who, Lewis emphasizes, was "a musician, a painter, a prolific writer, in addition to what most people know about him. Having a broad range just makes the cast iron skillet more seasoned."
Lewis's own "broad range" makes him a potent collaborator: in addition to the ensembles already mentioned, Lewis and poet Thomas Sayers Ellis co-leads Heroes Are Gang Leaders whose album Artificial Happiness Button (Ropeadope) was yet another of Lewis's releases in 2020. We spoke online just before the release of Jesup Wagon.
James Brandon Lewis: Molecular Systematic Music describes a twofold approach to music, braiding together the fundamentals of music theory with the ideas of molecular biology in the context of DNA. While I'm a musician, not a molecular biologist, the ideas expressed deploy the vocabulary of molecular biology as useful metaphors.
AAJ: You specifically mention "Helix," from Molecular as an example of your Molecular System Music paradigm, and yet you only play on the song for about a minute-and-a-half of its 4:45. What relation do your fellow musicians—Aruán Ortiz on piano, Brad Jones on bass, and Chad Taylor on drums and mbira—have, if any to the MSM paradigm in that song?
JBL: I think everyone's solo in this context was short. The song is pretty short , and I said what I needed to say musically and moved on. When collaborating with fellow musicians in the context of performing a piece such as "Helix," which is directly related to Molecular Systematic Music, I always rely on the musicians' well-trained instincts to generate variables not pertaining to the system itself. My goal in developing MSM is simply to encourage other players to discover their own innate tendencies. I employed specific structures within the melody definitely thinking of MSM .
AAJ: I believe the term "sheets of sound" originated with a jazz critic describing Coltrane's playing; whereas Ornette Coleman definitely developed his own theory of Harmolodics, just as the Molecular System Music paradigm is your own idea. I have a hard time understanding all three of these intellectual constructs, and yet I enjoy the music of Coltrane, Coleman, and Lewis. How important is it for you that your listeners, as well as the musicians who play your compositions, understand your underlying framework?
JBL: Heavy company to be named with, thank you! That's humbling. However there is more work to be done always Maybe it's important to know the context of how I came up with a particular piece or not. Music should maybe be just an experience that touches the heart bathed in the vibe of the moment. The theory can be left for non-listening moments, casual reading, but the context of someone's life and experience does reflect in their work, and to be seen is to be acknowledged. This system is a life's work that I am still defining every day. An artistic process that is daily, one that maybe just before I leave this realm I am a little closer to who I am musically because of it.
AAJ: In your original poem that you recite at the end of Jesup Wagon's "Chemurgy," "you refer to "resilient vessels." It occurred to me that "resilient vessels" could function as a meta-term for your various conceptions of biological, musical and cultural continuity. Am I stretching the term "resilient vessels" too far, or are you particularly interested in forms of continuity in both culture and music (and music-as-culture)?
JBL: I think you're on point with your thoughts on why I used these two words. I am always searching for ways to connect all of who I am to a larger conversation, a continued one, while at the same time not being so overt but coded just as DNA. In my work I enjoy leaving something to ponder rather than state it "so" as a matter of fact.
AAJ: Do you ever think of jazz standards as akin to DNA strands or memory board? I ask because on your and Live in Willisau you and Chad Taylor shift from some pretty frenetic, out-there playing to a quite reverent version of Duke Ellington's "Come Sunday."
JBL:I believe that jazz is a continuum that continually adds to its fabric the multitudes of ways we can think of music. Cecil Taylor in interviews has stated Ellington's influence in his own life, and I see them as connected rather than separate. I also went to school and was educated in what you would call standards. I see them as a part of my fabric in terms of schooling and that which I continue to listen to, however I also have a relentless curiosity to study what is of me today as well, and what is the soundtrack of my current life. I use the past at times as a framework of influence rather than ways to copy an approach of a particular time period but to re-contextualize the piece to add to the ongoing conversation of it, and how we might play those pieces today.
AAJ: We won't be able have in-depth discussions of all the musicians on your recent releases. However, Chad Taylor appears on all four albums, so I wonder if you could talk about your and Chad's background as collaborators, and also how his role has shifted from project to project. His versatility is outstanding, and I believe I've heard you comment that Taylor's drumming can become melodic at times—certainly there are moments, for me on Molecular, in particular, when you seem to playing the same solo in tandem on different instruments.
JBL: I think there is a language that Chad and I are building on each album. Chad Taylor's diversity of styles aids in me being able to venture into many melodic spheres with no apprehension, and this makes the music very free. It's been a joy to work with Chad, not only can he play but is a great person.
AAJ: It's hard for me ask an analytic question about Molecular because I've just let the album soak into my mind and spirit as I drive around Los Angeles. However, I keep coming back to the 7-minute "Neosho," a song in which, by my count, you lay out for about half of the time, although your solo occupies the song's center. At other times, however, various other players take over the song, in trios, singles, and even solo. I find the song vey hypnotic, and I wonder if you might mind digging into how it came together.
JBL: Neosho, Missouri is where George Washington Carver spent time as a youth. I try to place markers in my work toward the next direction. That track is one of my favorites as well. I like to construct music so that everyone feels as though they can be who they are fully. I also lay out on purpose to build in a way that speaks to "us" rather than "I."
AAJ: How important is it for listeners of Jesup Wagon —which features you on tenor, Kirk Knuffke on cornet, the great William Parker on bass and gimbri; Christopher Hoffman on cello; and Chad Taylor on drums and mbira—to know anything about George Washington Carver? Conversely, how did you conceive of the album as a tribute to him or an exploration of his ideas?
JBL: I decided to pay tribute to George Washington Carver because it acknowledges those things that I was interested in as a young child. My mother taught fifth and sixth grade and taught math and science and so there is that influence of course. I tap into the things of my youth as an adult, now realizing there are more layers to unpack that can add depth to the initial spark. I think it's helpful for anyone to understand that context of any creative endeavor, it does not hurt to know. For me, knowing the legacies of great people such as George Washington Carver gives me strength in dealing with my own challenges, knowing the challenges of others before me.
AAJ: In his liner notes, renowned American historian Robin D. G. Kelley quotes you as saying about Jesup Wagon, "The idea of using just strings and horns with drums, brings about a certain kind of blues earthy vibe, a certain blues in feeling not in theory. I wanted the music to be folk" [encompassing] "folk elements—nature, nurture, and plant life." Maybe because Molecular is more based in your Molecular Systematic Music than, apparently, the more vernacular idiom of Jesup Wagon, the latter album has a whole different feel to me. Did you start with the idea of "using just strings and horns with drums" and then think of particular collaborators, or was the process more organic?
JBL: I had a sound in mind first which is how I work—sound then players and I had desired to use kora initially with drums and horns; however I shifted and decided to use gimbri, and the mbira, and yes, William and Chad fit the bill. The process is also always organic, and relationships with these gentlemen over the years that sparked the idea of putting this group together. I also try to make sure every album sounds different, which is an extreme challenge but one that inspires me to further reach deeper and past sounds I already explored.
AAJ: I'm glad Kelley mentioned Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" in his commentary on "Chemurgy," because I certainly hear a lot of Ornette, as both a both a player and composer on Jesup Wagon; but the combination of Chris Hoffman's cello and William Parker's bass also reminds me of Henry Threadgill's Sextett from 1980s, which often paired Diedre Murray on cello and Fred Hopkins on bass. (Of course Hoffman plays cello in Henry Threadgill's Zooid) However, it's the job of critics like me to make comparisons between ensembles like this one, while it's your freedom as a musician to brush all these comparisons aside and just talk about how this ensemble helped you make the kind of music you want to make to honor George Washington Carver?
AAJ: Kelley mentions that "'Low land of sorrow' was a common phrase found in African American prayer and song; it refers to the downtrodden, the oppressed, but also to the secular world of wickedness." How does your song "Low Land of Sorrow" engage with these vernacular and religious traditions, if at all?
JBL:"Lowlands of Sorrow" was a term George Washington Carver used in describing the downtrodden places he would go to disseminate information on soil restoration, crops, and so on . I think the song sounds like movement, whatever it becomes throughout the song it starts with movement. It sounds like earth, like continuation of the bell patterns of old, the call and the response to make things progress forward.
AAJ: I believe Jesup Wagon was recorded in August, 2020, that is, during the height of the pandemic—and indeed before the presidential election. Was recording this album during the pandemic different in any substantive ways from recording Molecular, pre-pandemic?
JBL: It was never my intention to create any art marked by this time period. That is the main difference in this album and others, the original intent was to not even acknowledge this time because it felt wrong to be working while folks are losing their lives, it felt selfish. However I began to realize that not creating or being creative, I was hurting myself in the process, because music provides a certain level of hope and possibility that keeps me positive. I realized that one cannot help others if their own ship is sinking.
AAJ: I have to ask about your musical relationship with William Parker, which goes at least back to 2011, when you, Parker, Gerald Cleaver, and poet Thomas Sayers Ellis recorded your album Divine Travels (O-keh). Since then, I believe you toured with the William Parker Organ Quartet in France and played one-off gigs with his bands Mayan Space Station and In Order To Survive, in a configuration that included you, Matthew Shipp, Gerald Cleaver, Rob Brown, and of course Parker. I remember after that last-mentioned gig, which took place during the pandemic, you wrote somewhere, "I learned a lot." What have you learned from Parker as (I presume) a mentor but also as an equal who, from time to time, plays in your bands?
AAJ: What's next? You're certainly a composer and musician who never stands still; and in fact I've read somewhere about a new release from you in July. What do 2021, 2022, and beyond hold for James Brandon Lewis? Selfishly, I hope your post-pandemic tour plans include a stop in Los Angeles, where I can see you perform in person.
JBL: I have a fear and that is becoming complacent, which is why I am always studying and pushing things further. I also have a healthy relationship with being curious. If you're curious you can never become complacent and if you're complacent you will never desire to be curious. I would love to come out to L.A., and thanks so much for supporting the work, and asking these in-depth questions. Up next—another quartet record, a trio record, a solo album, and more writings.
Since moving to New York City in 2012, tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis has been creating quite a stir with his blustery tone and take-no-prisoners approach. Lewis, who leads his No Filter Trio and Unruly Notes, appears in a scintillating, conversational duo setting with drummer Chad Taylor on Radiant Imprints, his fifth album overall and the first for the Off-Record label.
Lewis’ 2010 debut as a leader, Moments, was recorded when he was studying at Cal Arts with Charlie Haden, Wadada Leo Smith and Joe LaBarbera. His follow-up on the OKeh label, 2014’s Divine Travels, came to fruition following a suggestion from pianist Matthew Shipp that the saxophonist and newly minted New York resident record with bassist William Parker and drummer Gerald Cleaver. His 2015 Days Of Freeman was a far funkier affair, featuring electric bass icon Jamaaladeen Tacuma, in-demand drummer Rudy Royston and producer High Priest (aka Hprizm), of Antipop Consortium fame. Back in January, Lewis also made a strong impression while performing with Harriet Tubman during the troupe’s 2018 Winter Jazzfest performance of Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you hook up with Chad Taylor?
I first played with Chad maybe three years ago at this place that no
longer exists, which was called the Y Not Jazz Room. I had seen Chad
play with [pianist] Cooper-Moore and a few other people that I know in
the New York area, and I was just taken aback by his playing. Of course,
his history of playing with Fred Anderson, Rob Mazurek and the whole
Chicago scene is pretty awesome. So, I just feel honored that he and I
could come together and make this duo project happen.
I’ve definitely grown a lot playing with him, because it’s very interactive. He’s not on autopilot, nor does he want to play with people who are on autopilot. It’s like, “Come on, react!” And it’s a beautiful conversation. It never goes to a place of just bashing or competing—but more of a healthy dialogue. So, I’m excited about the music, but also I’m excited about this new partnership-collaboration with Chad. It’s just going to get better with time.
There’ve been so many great sax-drums duo records.
John Coltrane and Rashied Ali, Charles Lloyd with Billy Higgins, Andrew
Cyrille and Jimmy Lyons—the list goes on and on. But I definitely feel
like we have a little to say and contribute to that rich legacy.
The thing about a duo, you’ve gotta be willing to fall flat on your face and get back up again. If you’re not willing to do that, it’s not going to work. That’s true improvisation … to be able to be OK with making the mistake. You gotta have some risk factor in there. That’s the thing that I’m learning.
There’s a YouTube clip from 2016 of you and Chad playing at the 6BC Gardens in the East Village. You open with “Imprints,” your take on John Coltrane’s “Impressions.” That piece and other Trane-inspired work appears on Radiant Imprints.
It’s funny because that concert that Chad and I did as part of the
Gardens series happened two or three weeks after I played solo at a John
Coltrane tribute concert in Philadelphia. It was a solo sax marathon
with me, Sonny Fortune, Billy Harper, James Carter, Azar Lawerence, Greg
Osby, Odean Pope and others to commemorate Trane’s 90th anniversary.
For that concert, I worked out a lot of fragmentation of Trane’s music.
“Imprints” is my take on “Impressions,” “Twenty Four” combines fragments
of “Giant Steps” and “26-2,” “With Sorrow Lonnie” is based on “Lonnie’s
Lament.” The whole inspiration for these pieces I developed was not
wanting to go to that saxophone marathon concert and just play Trane
tunes like how Trane would play it. There’s only one Trane. No one’s
gonna do it better than Trane did it. So, you’re already up against
Mount Everest when you try to get into that dance.
I wanted to do more of a nod than a regurgitation, so I came up with the idea of incorporating fragments of his tunes. To do a reinterpretation and fragment the melody was a very succinct decision to give a nod and then offer my own voice.
Talk about the profound influence that Coltrane’s music has had on your own playing.
I think just his willingness to take risks was so inspiring to me and so
many other saxophone players. He was always searching and he was
comfortable with who he was in his search. I checked out a lot of
different things by him growing up, and I checked out a lot of his
influences … different people he was involved with. No one can take away
anything that he’s ever done. And there will never be another John
Coltrane. To get caught up in chasin’ the Trane or trying to surpass him
… it’s not about that. It’s about mapping his road and his progress and
creating your own musical challenges and problems that are uniquely
geared to what you are trying to work on.
You have a bold tone and a very powerful attack. But at the same time, on a tune like “Loved One,” you make use of space and dynamics throughout that piece.
That piece in particular has got a very kind of folk quality to it … maybe some Eastern influences in it. There’s many different timbres, many different ways to articulate a melody. And so that piece is a challenge for me to play, just because of my wanting to get the right interpretation of it. And I love that challenge. Every time I play it, I have to ask, “Did you play with enough space? Are those chords and the melody line really interacting with themselves?” It’s challenging. It’s a very beautiful piece and I feel like it’s one of my favorite pieces that I’ve ever penned.
The thing that I have realized about myself, and it certainly pertains to this tune, is I’m always going to be a tonal player. There’s a lot of motivic kind of development happening, so it isn’t completely random or atonal. Nor is it completely thought out. It’s somewhere in the middle. I practice, I try to spend a fair amount of time on the horn and I love melody. So, it’s been my habit over the last six years to build my solos off of the melody and do those kinds of fragments. And repetition is important in my playing in building stuff forward. Repetition builds tension, and so when you release it, it’s no different than talking.
Can you sum up your current musical direction?
I respect tradition, I’ve studied it, I’ve been to school, I’ve played
with people that a lot of people respect and I’m just trying to say,
“Hey, maybe you might think this is creative. We decided to do this and
we’re offering it.”
I’m not trying to cure cancer, I’m not trying to be Trane and I’m not trying to be any of these people. I’m just trying to have a little offering, just a little voice, not a whole lot. I don’t want a whole lot, just a little bit, just a tiny bit. DB
http://jazzbluesnews.com/2019/09/18/james-brandon-lewis/
Interview with James Brandon LewisVIDEO
JazzBluesNews
September 18, 2019
INTERVIEWS, VIDEOS
Jazz interview with jazz saxophonist James Brandon Lewis. An interview by email in writing.
JazzBluesNews.com: – First let’s start with where you grew up, and what got you interested in music?
James Brandon Lewis: – I grew up in Buffalo New York , Very eclectic city of various music styles from Rick James, Juni Booth, Charles Gayle, Goo Goo Dolls, Ani Defranco, Joe Ford and Grover Washington JR to, Soulive. My parents were into music, specifically my mom seeing my interest in music from movies to television and so on suggested i pick up an instrument .
JBN: – How did your sound evolve over time? What did you do to find and develop your sound?
JBL: – I feel as though my sound is a work in progress but i feel closer than when i first started playing saxophone. I feel like when your study the greats you get a grasp of the sound platte of the saxophone, and the many ways to attack your sound, example being say you think you sound is coming from low register part of the instrument, well many greats come to mind but one i remember checking out is Dexter Gordon , beautiful low register, i mean there are so many to check out, I once saw a documentary on Dewey Redman, and there is a clip of him playing the major scale i said wow what is that lolololol his sound made that scale sound different, because he had such an amazing sound conception it just sounded like music, and not a scale. So it just depends on what kind of sound can you imagine and striving for that, with the elders being a guide.
JBN: – What practice routine or exercise have you developed to maintain and improve your current musical ability especially pertaining to rhythm?
JBL: – Practicing longs tones with metronome at 40 beats per min, is great stamina builder and a pulse centeredness exercise, slowness gives discipline as well as its a great meditation of centering the mind.
JBN: – Which harmonies and harmonic patterns do you prefer now? You’re playing is very sensitive, deft, it’s smooth, and I’d say you drift more toward harmony than dissonance. There is some dissonance there, but you use it judiciously. Is that a conscious decision or again, is it just an output of what goes in?
JBL: – I am not sure if i have harmonic preferences, or patterns for that matter, i think i am in a constant battle with my ear, and it always being so in the box of whats harmonically pleasing , of course yes its natural but its also unnatural to always hear something the same way of and over, i like the dissonance as a choice to revolt against my natural tendency, or building tension tension tension never releasing because sometimes life is like that there is never any give with the trials that come with living sometimes, or at least it feels that way. I have concluded though that life is both harmonious and dissonant and embracing both is true freedom.
JBN: – How to prevent disparate influences from coloring what you’re doing?
JBL: – I just try and focus on my path , and honor it, it makes looking myself in the mirror more agreeable. I can live with pursuing the truest version of myself, rather than focusing on how some one else is driving their car, you tend to get in a wreck that way, so its best to stay focused.
Today i am working on some quartet music for bass, drums, sax, piano, influenced by molecular biology … hopefully make some head way with that in the near future.
JBN: – What’s the balance in music between intellect and soul?
JBL: – I think about this often the relationship with intellect and soul and or rather emotion is something that all musicians must think about or should and i say this not from a higher than all knowing place but two experiences come to mind after i made divine travels, a family member said yes this sounds great, and then when i released days of freeman they said yes i can feel this, not sure what you were trying to do on the other but it sounded too much like art, or complex . Now of course these are opinions but it did force me to think about what those statements mean,and it takes me to a place of reflecting on self and what i am trying to communicate through music be it good or bad whats the value in what i am trying to say musically speaking. I merely try to feel all the music i make and yes there is some of course intellect involved i mean its impossible to separate because its contained in one body. Balance comes from a careful examination of going beyond self when it comes to music, and reaching that place that touches the depth of soul heart and mind , and communicates on a level that is beyond our finite existence within in the scope of this grand design.
JBN: – There’s a two-way relationship between audience and artist; you’re okay with giving the people what they want?
JBL: – A dance between to parties is important, growing on both sides aware of i get some you get some, a playful exchange never one sided.
JBN: – Please any memories from gigs, jams, open acts and studio sessions which you’d like to share with us?
JBL: – Having recorded with William Parker, Gerald Cleaver, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and Rudy Royston and many others i can say I treasure how professionally present each person was in the studio and invested in the moment, its something i try to bring when asked to participate any other peoples projects. I also have had a great time playing traveling the world with my with my peers the JBL Trio, Luke stewart and Warren G Crudup III and Unruly Manifesto group with Jaimie Branch and Anthony Pirog. and collaboration is always a challenge but i love the 12 piece poetry and jazz group Heroes Are Gang Leaders that i am co founder off, talk about coming to agreed decisions lol, but yeah its all love.
JBN: – How can we get young people interested in jazz when most of the standard tunes are half a century old?
JBL: – I think young people are interested in all music at this point because its so available because of technology. I think age as little to do with but the perpetuations of certain ideas pertaining to jazz that maybe pushes young folk away, but yeah we have many kids still signing up for jazz school so i think its in a decent place.
JBN: – John Coltrane said that music was his spirit. How do you understand the spirit and the meaning of life?
JBL: – I think i am still trying to figure all this out i have no definitive answers but only open questions in hopes of one day knowing or not and thats okay. The spirit is that which dwells in the body, the body just a instrument to the spirit, maybe i am taking a crack at this question and for me the meaning of life, well who knows but an everyday goal should be to find the truth of what this is past a taught understanding of what this is and knowing for self being the greatest tool because you have not relinquished your freedom of knowing for self to the expert.
JBN: – If you could change one thing in the musical world and it would become a reality, what would that be?
JBL: – Proper infrastructure in place for artist to represented on a governmentally level and see actual benefits of this.
JBN: – Who do you find yourself listening to these days?
JBL: – Lately- Andrew Hill and Mal Waldron.
JBN: – What is the message you choose to bring through your music?
JBL: – I hope its gives people courage to be who they are, and know its possible.
JBN: – Let’s take a trip with a time machine, so where and why would you really wanna go?
JBL: – I would go and talk with Charlie Parker to really hear how stuff was the details, the thought process rather than the act but what informed creation, as oppose to the things that ended up being myths over time due to idolization.
JBN: – I have been asking you so far, now may I have a question from yourself…
JBL: – I am always curious why people want to know what i think or have to say, because on saxophone i pick it up and always feel like i am that 12 year old in buffalo ny who still does not know anything but trying to find his way .. why the interview? what is it that maybe sparked a interest to ask me for an interview?
JBN: – So putting that all together, how are you able to harness that now?
JBN: – Thanks for answers. The interview shows your intelligence, thanks to which the audience understands how smart and deep you are.
JBL: – One day at a time, nothing more or less, i use my time wisely and try to make it count.
Interview by Simon Sargsyan
Hank Roberts - cello
Kirk Knuffke - cornet
Chad Taylor - drums
https://www.capitalbop.com/james-brandon-lewis-on-finding-the-road-least-traveled
James Brandon Lewis on finding the road least traveled
Can a focused mind wander? Can a peaceful person do battle? Contrasts and unlikely associations seem to guide the young saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, perhaps none more than this one: How does complication and murkiness help you access something simple—even elemental?
Lewis, 30, was raised playing jazz and gospel in Buffalo, N.Y., then educated at Howard University and the California Institute of the Arts. With a sound that reaches out, touches firmly, then pulls away, he seems accustomed to following his convictions on a beeline, even when they lead into the thicket.
What I’m angling at here is that things sometimes get choppy on Divine Travels, Lewis’ new album and his first on a major label, but they never throw you overboard. The record casts an imposing shadow—it features William Parker on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums, two of the most storied free improvisers around, and finds Lewis in wrangling, stippled interplay with the poet Thomas Sayers Ellis on two tracks. But it doesn’t let go of you, partly because Cleaver plays the drums like Abdullah Ibrahim plays piano, laying out a bed of tone and topography rather than overemphasizing his punctuation marks. And partly because Lewis is big on consolidating impulses: He makes sense of all his reference points (classic gospel, mid-period John Coltrane, Dewey Redman) by draping his improvisations around minor-key structures. They give your ear context, and a home base.
Lewis performs at Blues Alley this Thursday with a different trio: Dominic Fragman on drums and Luke Stewart (also an editor for CapitalBop) on bass. Lewis and I spoke via phone earlier this month about his time as an undergraduate here in D.C., his collaboration with Ellis (a D.C. native and former go-go singer), and the dedication to openness that informs his approach.
CB: It’s not uncommon for jazz musicians to begin their studies in the church, but you actually went out West for a while and started a gospel career. What did you pick up along the way?
JBL: It was a part of my experience. My dad was living in Colorado, so after I graduated from Howard University I went out there. He’s a Baptist minister. I’ve always been playing in the church—it’s been a part of my experience. And developing a career in that music is just a matter of it already being a part of my experience. Studying in the context of church, you still hear the emotional content of the music, as well as the intellectual aspects of a person being learned.
Overall, what I take from that experience—like what I take from any experience—is that you learn what you’re open to learning. And if you’re closed, you’re closed. I’m a pretty open person, in that I learn something from any situation. The church has been an experience of fellowship, between lots of different people, whether it’s doctors or lawyers or teachers.
I was even a part of church groups while I was a student at Howard. I helped out as a chapel assistant at Rankin Chapel. It’s just been a part of my experience.
CB: You seem to be very conscious of the saxophone’s voice-like quality. Who has helped you develop an understanding of the instrument from that point of view — in terms of predecessors, mentors and peers?
JBL: We don’t have that long of a day to get into all that! I tend to want to refrain from cliché things, so I don’t want to say a cliché thing. But what I will say is that while I was in D.C. I studied with Charlie Young. He’s a legend in the city. When I met him, I had been playing in the church but also taking private lessons. I was in county band in Buffalo. As these things developed, when I met him, we got the sound aspect together, the technique, all those things.
Then fast forward to being in California, and I’m working with Wadada Leo Smith and Charlie Haden. I just played the Dolphy Festival in Montclair, N.J., and I played with Richard Davis and Andrew Cyrille, all these amazing people.
But I think what’s informed me is my own personal search. Early on, when I was at Howard, I was into Dexter Gordon and Wayne Shorter. Then later on, I think the people that I sort of latched onto and investigated on my own were Yusef Lateef, Ornette Coleman, Wardell Gray. It really was the study of [Gray] and Dewey Redman one whole summer. There’s this Wardell Gray box set, and what I took away from that is that Wardell Gray was very lyrical. He had a good mix of the bebop and the big band-era sound. That really made him have a great, lyrical line; it didn’t sound very patternistic.
Now, if we think about Dewey Redman and Ornette — who has a very vocal quality — you can listen to recordings of Redman when he’s trying to speak through the horn. Literally saying words while he’s playing sax.
CB: You mentioned avoiding cliché. How’s that manifest in study?
JBL: When you’re in school you learn the techniques and scales. But then
when you’re out of school you learn music. Which is more of a
philosophical approach. You’re constantly searching to define you. Your
path is uniquely yours.
CB: Washington, D.C., is an underrated but extremely important
incubator of American music, particularly Black music. Can you talk
about what it was like to be here?
JBL: First of all, of course, I was coming from Buffalo, N.Y., which
also has a rich history of music that no one talks about. [laughs] I
reflect a lot on my experiences in D.C. and then getting my MFA at
California Institute of the Arts. I enjoyed D.C., I learned a lot. When I
was in D.C., I was playing with my friends a lot. We were shedding
Chick Corea, those kinds of things.
In my big band alone you had Eric Wheeler, you had McClenty Hunter, Taylor Pace. So many amazing musicians that are now in the thick of things, I went to Howard with.
CB: How did your relationship with Thomas Sayers Ellis develop, and how has it opened you up artistically?
JBL: I met Thomas in 2011 at a residency in Florida. That’s also where I
met Matthew Shipp. It was the Atlantic Center for the Arts. There were
three master instructors: Thomas, Matthew and Rick Lowe. Some of my
peers were coming out of [Ellis’s] class—other students, because I
didn’t take his classes—and I noticed that a lot of kids were coming out
of the room crying. I said, “Wow what’s happening?” I think I was sorta
drawn to that—like, I need to meet this person, see what’s up.
It’s a tough love approach that sort of reminded me of Howard. I don’t know if that pushing works for everyone, but I think it is a method that can be used in learning, in trying to get people to where they need to go. So, quite naturally, I just hit it off with him.
And then he was one of the people, along with Matthew Ship, James Newton and Wadada Leo Smith, who encouraged me to move to New York.
CB: Talk about what it’s like to work with him.
JBL: When we collaborate, I think what I get is that it’s not about me,
it’s not about him, it’s about the overall sound of the collaborative
process. When I think about Skin Inc.
[Ellis’s most recent poetry collection], the way it looks on the page
is very similar to the way I think about music naturally: It’s very
fragmented.
When I was at Howard, my friends and I would accompany poets and we would just be grooving with the poet on top. It’s kind of this cliché thing. My collaboration with Thomas has been anything but that. It’s more like, I go home and look at the poetry, me and him study the lines, and we come up with different things. It’s very fragmented.
And then Thomas was in go-go bands when he was growing up. So it’s
quite natural for us to get into a groove, a headspace, where we’re
almost one voice. I’ve learned a lot just in the way that he thinks.
Even sometimes when we listen to music, there might be five or six
voices. And he can hear all six voices in one voice. I don’t necessarily
go into this thinking I’m the saxophonist and he the poet; we’re just
trying to create one sound. And he can hear like that—which is amazing.
That’s like Gil Evans, hearing everything as one composition. So I’ve
learned a lot. 
Photo courtesy jblewis.com.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Brandon_Lewis
James Brandon Lewis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
James Brandon Lewis (August 13, 1983 in Buffalo, New York)[1] is an American jazz composer and saxophonist.[2]
Life
Lewis graduated from Howard University in 2006, after which he focused on gospel music. In 2012, he relocated to New York City and switched to jazz, releasing his first album Divine Travels in 2014.[1] This album was followed by nine more albums, including Jesup Wagon, which was selected as Album of the Year by DownBeat critics in 2022.[3]
Discography
- Divine Travels (2014)
- Days of the FreeMan (2015)
- Radiant Imprints (2018, with Chad Taylor)
- An Unruly Manifesto (2019)
- Live in Willisau (2020, with Chad Taylor)
- Molecular (2020)
- Jesup Wagon (2021, with Red Lily Quintet
- Eye of I (2023)
- For Mahalia, with Love (2023, with Red Lily Quintet)
- Transfiguration (2024)
- The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis (2024, Impulse! Records, with The Messthetics)
https://vimeo.com/91980003
April, 2014
James Brandon Lewis at the white house trailer
Just a taste of their performance.
To see the whole thing
please contact: jamesbrandonlewis@gmail.com
James Lewis, saxophone
Marco Bojorquez, bass
Michael Welch, drums
Anne-Marie Colwell, art
James Brandon Lewis’ Red Lily Quintet:
Jesup Wagon | Roulette Intermedium
The Quarantine Concerts - James Brandon Lewis
James Brandon Lewis' Red Lily Quintet: Jesup
A Lotus Speaks James Brandon Lewis
James Brandon Lewis Unruly Quintet, North Sea
James Brandon Lewis Trio + 1 - Raise up off me
TIDAL SESSIONS Series Presents: James Brandon Lewis
James Brandon Lewis Trio - at Not A Police State / Arts For Art - January 5 2016:
PDX Jazz Video Premiere April 1st "Even the Sparrow" : James Brandon Lewis
PDX Jazz is honored to premiere
Even the Sparrow on April 1st,
a new piece by James Brandon Lewis
in celebration of Jazz Appreciation Month
Even the Sparrow
A JAZZ COALITION Commission Award composition
Bill Frisell guitar
Gerald Cleaver drums
Kirk Knuffke cornet
James Brandon Lewis tenor saxophone, composition
A Video collaboration with Michael Lucio Sternbach / Moon Lasso
Band Video footage & Audio recording — Scholes Studios / Rene Pierre Alain.
“During this time of COVID there has been much confusion, disparity, uncertainty and death. I offer this piece as uplift, a timely mediation to focus on the good and possibilities of the future with the glimmer of hope peaking through cracks of what may feel like infinite darkness. Let us be resilient in this moment and look forward.
I present “Even the Sparrow” I hope that it reaches you wherever you are and that you share it with those who are also in need of uplift through the medium of music. The musicians I selected embody the values of integrity, honesty and push for a greater good via music. Their sensibilities speak to a sensitivity to the music that brings about a collective meditation focused on us rather than I.” James Brandon Lewis
Tune in Tuesday March 30th 6-7pm PDT to PDX JAZZ RADIO HOUR on KMHD.ORG to hear a James Brandon Lewis special episode on his inspirations, the new piece Even the Sparrow, a preview track from Jesup Wagon (out May 7th), selections from his Divine Travels, Molecular, Unruly Manifesto, Radiant Imprints, Heroes as Gang Leaders and music of William Parker and Bill Frisell.
THIS EPISODE is Available NOW on our MIXCLOUD CHANNEL, as well as all other PDX JAZZ RADIO HOUR Episodes.
James Brandon Lewis is a critically acclaimed saxophonist and composer who has received accolades from New York Times, NPR, ASCAP Foundation, Robert Rauchenberger Foundation.
Jazz great Sonny Rollins stated this about Lewis “Promising Young Player with the Potential to do great things having listened to the Elders” — Jazz Magazine (France) and most recently voted Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist by Downbeat Magazine‘s 2020 Critics Poll.
James Brandon Lewis has released several critically acclaimed albums, leads numerous ensembles and is the Co-Founder of American Book Award winning poetry and music ensemble Heroes Are Gang Leaders. Lewis attended Howard University, and received his M.F.A from California Institute of the Arts.
James Brandon Lewis speaks with "Artists in Resonance"
