Includes a version of Mal Waldron’s ‘Left Alone’ and some incredibly moving James Brandon Lewis originals. Perhaps mellow by James Brandon Lewis standards. But the avantist’s originals habitually go deeper than most nevertheless. And so it proves on this latest quartet album.
First they hurt me, then desert me
Mal Waldron and Billie Holiday
I’m left alone, all alone
The fifth album by the James Brandon Lewis Quartet. Earlier albums all issued by Intakt are: Molecular (2020), best of the bunch Code of Being (2021), MSM Molecular Systematic Music (Live) (2022), and Transfiguration (2024).
Ted Panken writing in Jazz Times interviewing JBL notes that on Transfiguration the saxophonist deploys a bespoke 12-tone music conception and quotes him as saying: “Working out this system of improvisation and composition is a completely different head space.”
This latest high quality release was recorded in a Winterthur studio near Zurich in Switzerland last year. Pieces of JBL’s include a dedication to the hugely powerful free-jazz saxophonist David S. Ware (1949-2012) who generated enough energy to light up a city.
In the 1990s when Ware was signed to Columbia it was a big thing for a major label to take on a free-jazz player of any stripe. And this is a worthy tribute of an opening track to that extraordinary spirit who left us too soon. Go See the World of Ware’s is a spectacular album and there are elements of that feeling if not necessarily the spinetingling power of Ware (because he had a far bigger more Ayler-esque rawness) all over this record.
It’s been a great year yet again for fans of 41 year old saxophonist Lewis following on from the Amiri Baraka inspired Apple Cores, the American’s best work since the saxist’s OKeh period championed back then by Wulf Muller.
An inspiration of Baraka’s was James Baldwin who wrote in his hard hitting play Blues for Mister Charlie (1964): “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”
One certainly cannot accuse James Brandon Lewis of being sentimental. But one can embrace his reliable ability to touch the soul in whatever sense that has personal meaning. Abstract music doesn’t have to be cold and this mellower than usual highly credible outpouring regardless is proof.
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