The James Brandon Lewis Quartet

The saxophonist's bid for jazz immortality

L-R: James Brandon Lewis, Chad Taylor, Aruán Ortiz, Brad Jones

It seems impossible, given the breadth and depth of his output, but it’s true: Tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis has only been “on the scene” for a little over a decade. He’s made more than 20 albums under his own name in that time, and that’s not even counting the work of Heroes Are Gang Leaders, the large, Burnt Sugar-esque ensemble he co-led with poet Thomas Sayers Ellis. Lewis is extremely prolific, and the quality of his work is never less than impressive despite — maybe because of — its variety. In this piece, though, I want to focus on just one of his groups: the quartet he’s been leading since 2020 with pianist Aruán Ortiz, bassist Brad Jones, and drummer Chad Taylor.

The group seems to have arisen out of a Lewis/Taylor duo project. “I first saw Chad Taylor playing with Cooper-Moore in maybe 2014”, Lewis recalled in a 2021 interview with Troy Collins. “Anyway, we began collaborating after I did arrangements of Coltrane tunes for a solo saxophone marathon in Philly some time ago, and then decided to use those arrangements for our duo, which we recorded as our first album Radiant Imprints.”

That album, recorded in January 2017 at Park West Studios in Brooklyn, was released the following year. In its wake, the two performed in Austria, recording the album Live In Willisau, which included a version of “Willisee”, a piece from the Dewey Redman/Ed Blackwell album Red And Black In Willisau.

“My love for the duo recording Red And Black by Dewey Redman and Ed Blackwell, as well as Chad Taylor’s love for that recording, sparked our own duo and further cemented our dedication to the depth of exploration of the duo format”, Lewis told Collins. He added, “Chad has a high level of melodic lines via the drums and it inspires me. Also, his use of mbira adds to his overall artistry in very dynamic ways. His versatility in knowing many musical genres allows me to draw from multiple influences within my own experience, giving me ultimate freedom.”

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The first James Brandon Lewis Quartet album, Molecular, was recorded in January 2020 and released later that year. His previous working group had been a trio with bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Warren Trae Crudup III, which expanded to include guitarist Anthony Pirog and trumpeter Jaimie Branch. With those collaborators, Lewis swirled hard bop, post-harmolodic funk, and rock into a loud, cathartic sound, jazz you could pump your fist to. This, though, was something very different.

The tenor saxophone is the beating heart of jazz. The lineage of jazz tenor saxophone, from the 1920s to the present day, represents a legacy that living musicians must grapple with, night after night, on stages and in recording studios around the globe. Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Don Byas, Jimmy Heath, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Johnny Griffin, Charlie Rouse, Gene Ammons, Hank Mobley, Fred Anderson, Archie Shepp… the list goes on and on.

The modern tenor saxophone quartet, though, exists in the shadow of John Coltrane. It’s that simple. Obviously, he wasn’t the first tenor saxophonist to record and perform with that combination of musicians, but his work in quartet format from 1962 to early 1965 has become paradigmatic. Since Coltrane’s death, saxophonists — even legends like Sonny Rollins and Joe Henderson, never mind (chronologically if not stylistically) post-Coltrane players like David Murray and David S. Ware — have often seemed to approach their quartet albums with a certain obligation toward gravitas. And that’s definitely true of the work of the James Brandon Lewis Quartet. The compositions on Molecular have a stateliness and grace that he sidesteps in much of his other music.

That’s partly because they’re written according to a set of principles Lewis refers to as Molecular Systematic Music, which he explained in a 2020 essay. Fundamentally, his concept is that the sum of what a musician has heard in their life is the DNA of what they will play on their chosen instrument. “MSM offers musicians a way to discover their own musical DNA by examining their prior musical experiences, yielding a chart in the form of a ‘molecule’ which may then be used to generate ideas for composition and improvisation.”

Of course, a group’s sound is created by all of its players, and that’s certainly true here. Pianist Aruán Ortiz is adept at blurring jazz, the music of his native Cuba, and avant-garde/modern classical composition into one unique sound. Bassist Brad Jones is a subtle, calming presence, existing at the center of the music, not so much an anchor as a celestial body everything else orbits. And drummer Chad Taylor has a rolling, tom-heavy style that blends swing with diasporic grooves. And the three of them were playing together before Lewis came on board; they have a trio album from 2018, Live In Zurich, that’s very different from the quartet’s music. The performance consists of a 34-minute medley of two pieces, followed by an 18-minute one, and ends with a version of the standard “Alone Together,” and often sounds more like minimalist classical than jazz.

Molecular was a concise, declarative statement of group identity. The individual pieces were based on simple, strong melodies, from which Lewis took solo flight like a trick diver bouncing off a board, and they were often short, no more than four or five minutes. It was a very good album, but it was impossible to know, given how many different directions Lewis was traveling more or less simultaneously, whether this was just one more project, or something more. Two years later, though, in September 2022, the group released the double live CD Molecular Systematic Music Live, on which these same pieces sprawled out and bloomed like a garden left to itself. “A Lotus Speaks”, four and a half minutes long in its studio version, now ran on for more than 11 minutes. “Breaking Code” nearly tripled in length, from 5:33 to 13:15.

The May 15, 2021 concert documented on MSM Live was the quartet saying goodbye to that material; the next day, they entered the studio to record Code Of Being (released before the live set, in October 2021). And that album had the heat of a band coming straight off the road; the opening track, “Resonance”, began as a dancing ballad before swelling to a passionate eruption, with Taylor laying down a thundering backbeat and Lewis attacking the horn like it had wronged him. The title piece is anchored by a five-tone figure from Ortiz, over which Lewis solos with restrained power, never letting himself all the way off the leash. “Where is Hella” begins with a bowed drone from Jones and a wave of percussion like a rockslide from Taylor; when Lewis enters, he’s in an incantatory, Coltrane-ish mode, sustaining that energy for the piece’s entire 13-minute running time.

On the group’s third studio album, Transfiguration (recorded in July 2022 and released in 2024), they seem to recognize the peril of continuing down the same path of rigorous spiritual questing. There’s a lightness present that hasn’t been there before; even Taylor’s drums sound less like undersea booms and more like wood blocks, perfect for tapping out a clave. The opening title track showcases a melody that could have been written using the Ornette Coleman-meets-Jewish folk music formula of John Zorn’s Masada songbook, and “Swerve” feels like a tribute to Lewis’s fellow Buffalo, NY native, Grover Washington, Jr. In the album’s second half, though, things get heavy again. “Black Apollo”, “Empirical Perception” and the closer, “Élan Vital”, feel like explicit homages to the work of the David S. Ware Quartet; Lewis’s playing on “Black Apollo” in particular borrows many of Ware’s sonic signatures, including his mastery of low tones and his steel-wool shriek.

That connection is made even more explicit on the latest James Brandon Lewis Quartet album. Abstraction Is Deliverance, which came out last week, opens with a track simply titled “Ware”. And indeed, it has much in common with the music heard on albums like Flight Of I, Go See The World, or Surrendered (on which Ware paid tribute to important predecessor of his, Charles Lloyd); Lewis even pulls phrases drawn from Ware’s own compositions.

Make no mistake about it: this is an unambiguously good thing. David S. Ware was a titanic figure whose legacy, though assiduously maintained by those who knew and worked with him, has been inevitably fading since his death in 2012. He was the next link in the free jazz chain after Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Albert Ayler, keeping that music alive in the 1990s and 2000s. If, as Ayler said, Coltrane was the father, Sanders was the son, and he was the Holy Ghost, Ware was Lazarus, bringing the music out of the tomb of history and proving that it was as powerful and alive as ever. But no one has seemed ready or willing to pull the sword from the stone after him… until now.

There’s a lot more happening on this album, though. As Lewis explained at the beginning of the project, Molecular Systematic Music was and is about expressing one’s innermost nature through composition, and it’s easy to hear the components that have been part of his work from the beginning in the pieces here. Gospel is one of Lewis’s deepest influences — he dedicated an entire album to Mahalia Jackson — and while “Even the Sparrow” avoids an explicit gospel rhythm, the feeling of the Black church is very much present. The title piece blends free jazz bluster with a repetitive, almost looplike drum figure and a piano line full of classical filigree, making three (four, counting Jones’ gluey bass) seemingly disparate elements dance together. “Left Alone” is a swaying ballad; Taylor’s tom pulse and Jones’ groaning bowed bass feel like a nod to John Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament”, a piece the saxophonist and drummer previously adapted on Radiant Imprints.

James Brandon Lewis has led a lot of different ensembles in a little over a decade. He’s recorded with William Parker and Gerald Cleaver, and Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Rudy Royston; he’s led the aforementioned trio with Luke Stewart and Warren Trae Crudup III, and expanded it to a quartet and then a quintet; he’s made two albums with the Red Lily Quintet (cornet player Kirk Knuffke, cellist Chris Hoffman, Parker and Taylor); he’s recorded and toured with the Messthetics, featuring guitarist Anthony Pirog and former Fugazi bassist and drummer Joe Lally and Brendan Canty; and much more. But based on volume of output alone — four studio albums and a double live disc in five years — it’s possible to argue that the quartet is his primary band, and the one that will secure his artistic legacy.

If that’s the case, and he’s explicitly picking up the torch passed from Coltrane to Sanders to Ayler to Ware, that’s both a smart move (jazz critics love a clear artistic lineage) and necessary. The Coltrane quartet, not only on A Love Supreme but on Coltrane, Crescent, and The John Coltrane Quartet Plays, struck a balance between This Is Important Music and pure rapturous beauty that has endured for 60 years. Ayler wasn’t as interested in that balance, seemingly preferring to unsettle the listener, though his final, more gospelized music offered an easier way in than records like Spiritual Unity or Bells; Sanders headed east and south, combining African and Asian instruments and ideas into a swirling global free jazz style that earned him a devoted cult following but, like Ayler’s music, wasn’t for everyone.

David Murray seemed like the heir apparent for a moment in the Seventies, but by the time he seemed interested in seriously grappling with the saxophone quartet as a thing, on the 1988 albums Lovers, Deep River, Ballads, Spirituals, and Tenors with pianist Dave Burrell, bassist Fred Hopkins, and drummer Ralph Peterson Jr., he was already established as a man in his own lane. (One day I’ll write an essay about those five albums, though.) Wayne Shorter led a quartet — pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci, drummer Brian Blade — for almost 20 years, and he wrote plenty of new music for the group during that time, but they never made a studio album. (The full quartet only appears on three tracks from Shorter’s 2003 album Alegría, and the studio disc of 2018’s half-studio/half-live Emanon adds a chamber orchestra.) Branford Marsalis has been leading his current group for many years, too, but be honest: have they made a genuinely great album yet?

So if, like me, you think the world needs a magisterial tenor sax/piano/bass/drums quartet to represent one of the things that makes jazz great, James Brandon Lewis is the guy you want to be listening to.

That’s it for today. See you on Friday, when I’ll be telling you about 14 newly reissued albums by another highly individualistic tenor saxophonist, Ivo Perelman.