A mighty sound found on this Amiri Baraka, Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman minded latest from widely adored punk jazz saxophonist James Brandon Lewis.
We’re preaching to the converted probably – but it’s a sense of pushing against an open door when you embark on listening to yet another JBL record. He already has a voluminous body of work.
You know what you’re going to get given his signature sound – but you also clock that you will be rewarded on some higher level or another.
And so it occurs here painted all over. The main rewards are the sonics – brilliantly clear microphone capture and Chad Taylor’s drumming is compelling. It’s quite Ronald Shannon Jackson like when the beat is at its heaviest.
But most of all I was moved by the soliloquising saxophone heard on ‘Of Mind and Feeling’ which is worth the price of the album alone.
Josh Werner’s guitar work here adds layers of atmosphere and is a cut above everything else on the album which is shaped mainly around sax, Werner (elsewhere on bass guitar) and drums.
Named after a series of columns that Amiri Baraka wrote for the jazz magazine Downbeat in the 1960s, Apple Cores also includes a cover of Ornette Coleman’s ‘Broken Shadows’. The complex reggae hinting flavours on ‘Prince Eugene’ is also a plus point. ‘Don’t Forget Jayne’ is dedicated to poet Jayne Cortez. Some of JBL’s best blowing is of David Murray calibre on the second of the ‘Apple Cores’ pieces.
- James Brandon Lewis, with the Messthetics, plays The Pink Room in Yes, Manchester tonight
Turn on, tune in, drop out – more from marlbank