Jazz thrives on innovation. It depends on new musicians shaking up the basking complacency of the masters, the perceived wisdom of the mainstream, the unsettling feeling that there’s nothing new under the sun.
Enter saxophonist James Brandon Lewis whose major label debut Divine Travels is released in early-February. A child of the 1980s, from Buffalo in New York state, Lewis, 30, has studied with Charlie Haden. He’s studied with his hero Wadada Leo Smith. He’s studied at Banff with Dave Douglas. He’s got the ear of Matthew Shipp, even. A Howard university graduate his sideman credits include Charles Gayle, Marilyn Crispell, and Ed Schuller. He has fire in his belly and his music is soaked in the spiritual end of free jazz. A young pretender in the Pharoah-meets-David S. Ware line he’s coming at the music from the outside, from that perilous demanding gospellised free-into-improv sphere that no matter what people who hear music of the mainstream say always instals change. Divine Travels finds Lewis with bassist William Parker and drummer Gerald Cleaver, two avant garde prophets from that influential sound world where at the beginning of the journey, in the parlance, John Coltrane was ultimately the father, Pharoah Sanders the son, and Albert Ayler the holy ghost. Divine Travels is Lewis’ second album four years on from Moments and among its 10 tracks includes collaborations with Washington DC-born poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, author of The Maverick Room.
James Brandon Lewis pictured