In 2021, the saxophonist and composer James Brandon Lewis had a career breakthrough with his 10th album, The Jesup Wagon. Inspired by the mobile agricultural education efforts of inventor George Washington Carver, the song cycle was hailed by critics for its dreamlike mosaic of gospel, folk-blues and catcalling brass bands. It was named Album of the Year at Jazz Times and DownBeat and a bunch of international jazz magazines, and it established Lewis as one of the provocative musical voices of his generation.
Along the way, Lewis drew the attention of many improvising artists, most notably the saxophonist and jazz deity Sonny Rollins, who doesn’t offer effusive praise very often. Moved by Lewis’ deep, spirit-seeking sound, Rollins said “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.”
After the praise chorus quieted down, Lewis inevitably began to think about next moves. It was the waning moments of pandemic panic, and he knew this much: He was itching to play. He also knew that he wasn’t interested in undertaking another extramusical research project like The Jesup Wagon. He took time to ruminate on the 10 years he’d spent as a musician in New York City, and the experiences he had leading his own groups while seizing chances to mix it up with punk bands and hip-hop MCs and free jazz titans. He thought about the moments when he felt most alive. They shared a trait: They were not cerebral exercises in high-concept heaviness. They happened when he was loose, in the moment, running on pure visceral instinct.
“I come from the generation that went to school to learn music,” says Lewis, a self-described seeker and old soul of thirty-nine who did his undergrad at Howard University in Washington DC and earned his master’s at Cal Arts, where he studied with Charlie Haden and others. “What happens in that environment is everything becomes overly complicated. [After Jesup Wagon] I was aware about how inside my head I tend to get. I started thinking about the importance of breaking out of those thought patterns from school. At this point I have a kind of trained intuition, to know where stuff is supposed to go. I began to challenge that, and the more I did, the more I became obsessed with the basics.”
That sent Lewis on what became a thorough, revitalizing purge of his artistic trick bag. He cut out compositional complexities, focusing instead on earnest, sing-able melodies. He avoided some of the fancy jazz chords. He explored folk song themes like those he played with Mark Ribot on the stirring Songs of Resistance 1942-2018, which brought him to the attention of musicians outside of the jazz realm. (Ribot, a longtime admirer, advocated for ANTI- to sign Lewis, his impassioned message describing Lewis as a keeper of the legacy of John Coltrane: “James Brandon Lewis’ solos are like a jumbo jet – you need to give them plenty of runway space to take off and land.”)
Lewis’ melodic identity encompasses ancient and future, inside and outside, density and openness, church and street. He’s a master of the short infectious motif, and like Sonny Rollins, devotes long expanses of his improvisation to the stretching and refracting and mutating of short phrases. The son of a minister, Lewis grew up playing in church and hearing the titans of jazz at home, and then as he got older, encountering Buffalo artists like the free-jazz saxophonist Charles Gayle and the groove-minded saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. After moving to New York, Lewis pursued music in many different lanes, playing regularly with bassists William Parker and Jamaaladeen Tacuma from Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time band, as well as trombone player Craig Harris and many others.
For Mahalia, With Love, released on Tao Forms on September 8, 2023, was the highly anticipated album by James and his Red Lily Quintet, following their groundbreaking and poll-sweeping Jesup Wagon. This powerful work reimagines songs made famous by the gospel icon who galvanized a nation with her voice. The album is Lewis’ love letter to Mahalia Jackson and his grandmother.
There’s no easy shorthand for James Brandon Lewis’ musical M.O.,” Rolling Stone observed. “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.”
