Apr 8, 2025 1:23 PM
Blue Note Jazz Festival New York Posts 2025 Lineup
Blue Note Entertainment Group has unveiled the lineup for the 14th annual Blue Note Jazz Festival New York, featuring…
A former member of Chuck Mangione’s working band, Coleman Mellett died in a plane crash. Sixteen years later, his debut album is finally being released.
(Photo: David Guol Photography)“Spring is coming,” said Jeanie Bryson via FaceTime. The 67-year-old Jersey girl has been a gardener most of her life. Flanked by stalks and leaves, she sat in her greenhouse on an afternoon in February. “I can’t wait to get my hands in the dirt,” she said, looking beyond the plexiglass. “This is like my happy time.”
For Bryson, as it does for so many people, happiness coexists with grief. A singer and an acclaimed bandleader, the daughter of Dizzy Gillespie, she hasn’t performed publicly in 16 years — not since the death at age 34 of her husband and musical partner, Coleman Mellett. The late guitarist, who’d been a member of Chuck Mangione’s working band for nearly a decade, died in a plane crash on a flight from Newark to Buffalo in 2009. Bryson and Mellett had been together for 13 years.
But in February, with support from producer Barry Miles and engineer Ron DiCesare, Bryson released Sing You A Brand New Song, a project 16 years in the making. At once an artifact and an animate gesture, Sing You A Brand New Song combines a full-length recording of Mellett’s music on Ride Symbol Records with an award-winning film that documents the delicate task of finishing an artist’s album when they’re no longer here to guide the process.
“Thank God he finished the vocals,” said Bryson, who serves as film’s producer and album co-producer with Miles. The record’s 12 songs — 11 originals plus James Taylor’s “Fire And Rain” — reveal Mellett’s range as a musician and a songwriter. Subverted line cliches and surprise turns of melody add dimension to his frank, intimate lyrics. Bell-toned consonances dip into rubs. And on pensive tunes like “Oh Kayo” and “Fire And Rain,” a buoyant sweetness — now bittersweet — balms the pain. “I know about music,” said Bryson. “I know what’s good. This is good.”
The album began as rough demos, one of which Mellett sent to Miles in 2008. “I knew I wanted to put Coley [Collett’s nickname] and Barry together,” said Bryson, who admires Miles as an instrumentalist and an arranger. She felt Mellett’s demos needed piano, so she pressed the bashful guitarist. “I begged Coley to email Barry one song.”
Before long, Mellett and Miles were working toward releasing what would become Sing You A Brand New Song. “He just had so many things together,” said Miles. “He knew the jazz vocabulary and the language. And he also obviously loved the pop and R&B music from the ’70s and the ’80s.” Miles, who knew Mellett as a dexterous player on tour with Mangione, remembers his first encounter with the young songwriter’s lyrics: “Everybody was surprised with his lyrics, especially Jeanie’s mom,” said Miles, referencing the late composer and lyricist Connie Bryson. “I remember her saying, ‘Where are these songs coming from?’”
Days after the crash, and raw with grief, Bryson and Miles began the monumental task of finishing Mellett’s record without him. Amid sadness and confusion, Bryson clung to what she knew for certain: Mellett wanted to document his work. He had no aspirations of landing a recording contract. The album itself was the goal. “It was like, ‘I need to finish this for me. This is my work.’”
The record took roughly 13 months to complete. Miles and DiCesare sorted thousands of tracks in dozens of formats and sequencer programs. Four songs were nearly complete demos; the remaining were sketches. After organizing the raw material, Miles began calling musicians to fill out the sound. He and Bryson sought artists who would honor the music’s intimacy and its complexity. “All of these musicians donated their time and their talent,” said Miles. “There was no money involved.”
Mangione and bassist Will Lee recorded their contributions at Ultrasound in New York. At Miles’ Cape May studio, Bryson and singer Natascha Roth recorded backing vocals. The other artists, who include Larry Goldings on organ and Steve Gadd on brushes, recorded their parts remotely; from his studio in the Berkshires, James Taylor recorded guitar and vocals for multiple tracks. “I really wanted him to just play the rhythm guitar part,” said Miles, “but then he went ahead and did some background vocals in the choruses at the end of the one song. It was just a wonderful thing.”
To create an album whose sound stays true to the artist’s unadorned expression, Miles and DiCesare went into production overdrive. For “Morning Line,” Miles stripped Mellett’s three-vocal overlay down to one. “His voice was just so clear,” said Miles. “I wanted to make it even more intimate than it was without throwing everything away.” Named for Lummi Island in Washington, “Island Home” was a 50-second sketch of a verse and chorus. Using synth harmonica, Miles affects a call-and-response with Mellett’s wordless melody. “Luckily, the guitar and the voice were on separate tracks and there was no leakage from one to the other.” Because the album needed Bryson’s voice to feel complete, she proffered a track she and Mellett recorded together years earlier. After isolating each vocal and guitar track for what would be titled “You Got Me Too (remix),” Miles muted the reverb and brought down the tempo without changing the pitch before Lee recorded his bass part. Engineer Zack Kornhauser mastered the final mixes.
Not until Bryson reviewed the finished documentary did she realize Mellett’s songs were really just love letters; the film, a love story. Lyrics like “Take my hand so we can sit and watch the seasons change” and “Show me the way you make my grey skies blue/ So if you have to leave, I just might know what to do” unveil not only his poet’s soul but his profound devotion to Bryson. “It was a very deep, soulful connection,” she said, later adding, “it was a love of a lifetime.”
Eighteen months after his death, Bryson attended a James Taylor and Carole King concert in Holmdel, New Jersey. It was the first time she allowed herself to miss working with Mellett. “When I saw them on stage, I thought, ‘Oh, God, yes. I miss that,’” she said. “It was that musical connection of people that have been playing together for 50 years. And I realized how much I lost.”
With this project complete, Bryson looks toward the future. Though she hasn’t set foot on a plane in 16 years, she recently began working with a therapist to address her trauma from learning of Mellett’s death on the nightly news: “Looking at the picture of the fireball — that’s how I found out that his plane crashed.” As for the future of her career, she’d like to release decades-vaulted Jeanie Bryson recordings, one with Holland’s Metropole Orkest, another with Kenny Barron, Victor Lewis and Ray Drummond. “I think they’re valid recordings,” she said.
For the moment, her goal is to encourage people to hear Mellett’s album and view its unconventional recording process. In the backyard garden she shared with Mellett, through tears, she said, “All I want is for people to hear this. I know how many people it could touch if they would hear it. It’s just such joyful music.” DB
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