Jun 3, 2025 11:25 AM
In Memoriam: Al Foster, 1943–2025
Al Foster, a drummer regarded for his fluency across the bebop, post-bop and funk/fusion lineages of jazz, died May 28…
“I’m always searching,” said Lewis. “The work never ends.”
(Photo: Julien Vonier)James Brandon Lewis is no stranger to the DownBeat Critics Poll. In 2023, the Brooklyn-based saxophonist received the Rising Star on tenor saxophone and Best Group honors, celebrating a run of acclaimed releases including 2021’s Jesup Wagon, which honored the life and work of African American polymath Dr. George Washington Carver, and his 2023 boundary-pushing debut with the cult label Anti-, Eye Of I.
In 2024, he was named Critics Poll Artist of the Year, joining the likes of previous winners Charles Lloyd and Jon Batiste, and capping off a frenetic 12 months that saw him release his tribute to Mahalia Jackson, For Mahalia, With Love, with his Red Lily Quintet; a new record with his quartet, Transfiguration, playing his improvisatory system of “molecular systematic music”; and a debut collaborative album with post-punk supergroup The Messthetics, The Messthetics And James Brandon Lewis.
Lewis’ star has ascended even further to find him named Artist of the Year for the second year running and Tenor Saxophonist of the Year, alongside previous winners such as Stan Getz and John Coltrane. All three of his albums this year placed in the Top 20 for Album of the Year — Apple Cores with his trio; The Messthetics And James Brandon Lewis; and Transfiguration, his quartet recording.
“I’m still processing all these accolades, but at heart, I’m just James,” Lewis says from his hotel room while on the road in Pittsburgh. “There’s a vulnerability to putting so much work out there, and I’m humbled that these records have been received so well. I don’t make music to win awards, and I don’t see these awards as a point of arrival. They are simply the beginning of another phase — markers of time in my journey of creativity.”
Lewis might have 16 albums to his name since the release of his 2010 debut Moments, but it’s a strange coincidence that sees the most recent milestone in his creative journey taking inspiration from these very pages. On Apple Cores, his latest trio outing with longtime collaborators drummer Chad Taylor and bassist Josh Werner, Lewis pays homage to writer Amiri Baraka’s “Apple Cores” columns that chronicled the avant garde explorations of jazz in DownBeat throughout the 1960s.
“Amiri Baraka’s [Black Music, which contains the ‘Apple Cores’ columns] was required reading while I was studying at Howard University, so his writing has been with me for a long time,” Lewis explains. “I’ve never been one to label myself free-jazz or avant garde, I just enjoy blurring the line, and Baraka writes really engagingly and with such feeling in ‘Apple Cores’ about people blurring the line between form and abstraction. It felt like the perfect title to encapsulate this record.”
While Baraka’s writing provided the intellectual framework for the album, when it came to improvising with Taylor and Werner in the recording studio, another freewheeling jazz influence came to the fore musically: Don Cherry. Lewis is no stranger to the multi-instrumentalist and formative genre-breaker, recording a version of Cherry’s polyrhythmic 1985 track “Bamako Love” on his 2015 album Days Of FreeMan, as well as previously collaborating with Cherry’s bandmembers William Parker and Hamid Drake and being mentored by his Old And New Dreams bandmate Charlie Haden while studying composition at CalArts.
“I spent two days in the studio improvising with Josh and Chad and the resulting music spoke to me as a tribute to Don Cherry’s curiosity,” Lewis says. “I’ve always been a handshake away from meeting Don, and while he could have stayed in one lane, he was always pushing his creativity and curiosity, from incorporating instruments from around the world into his improvisations to rapping in the ’80s. He said that music should be of mind and of feeling, using our intuition to become what we are playing, and that’s something I have always strived towards, too.”
The resulting 11 tracks of Apple Cores employ Lewis’ signature muscular saxophone tone across compositions rooted in an earthy, deep-swinging sense of groove. Tracks like “Five Spots To Caravan” and “Apple Cores #1” see Lewis playing punchy, frenetic lines over Werner’s pulsating bass lines and Taylor’s textural drumming, while “Prince Eugene” floats through a balladic melody played on the mbira — a Zimbabwean thumb piano and an instrument Lewis says “is very Don Cherry.” “Don’t Forget Jayne” channels Ornette Coleman’s buffeting barrage of free saxophone phrasing, and “D.C. Got Pocket” does exactly what its title says, sinking into a fat-pocket funk groove worthy of Don Cherry’s piercing trumpet improvisations.
“The titles are references to these artists as much as the music,” Lewis continues. “‘Five Spots To Caravan’ nods to the Five Spot in New York where Ornette Coleman made his debut alongside Don Cherry in 1959, as well as the Caravan of Dreams performing arts center in Ornette’s hometown in Fort Worth, Texas, while tracks like ‘Remember Brooklyn & Moki’ and ‘Don’t Forget Jayne’ are my effort to draw attention to the spouses of these great musicians, Moki Cherry and Jayne Cortez [wife of Ornette Coleman]. They aren’t just ‘the wives,’ since there is a wealth of artistry in who these men decided to be with, and I like to imagine them all hanging out back in the day, sharing ideas and opinions on the music.”
As much as Apple Cores is a paean to the past greats of jazz music, it is equally a testament to Lewis’ longstanding relationship with Werner and Taylor and the enduring appeal of the trio format.
“I’ve been playing with Chad for at least a decade and Josh since 2018 — we’re always talking about music, and we have built it up over time, which means it’s always getting better and stronger,” he says. “Chad has worked with masters like Pharoah Sanders and Josh has played with people like Wu Tang Clan and Lee Scratch Perry, so between the three of us there is always a wealth of information to draw on when we’re playing.”
As a trio, Lewis pulls from this wellspring of creative trust as a jumping-off point for new and often unexpected explorations.
“The trio allows you to be more in charge of your melodic line, and I like the challenge of not knowing where it’s going to go next,” he says. “I enjoy not being able to rely on anything or being held up by anyone, since you have to be building the melodic development alone. There’s a freestyle sensibility and flow that makes the music happen and while I’m indebted to great saxophone trios like Sonny Rollins’, I equally find my trio playing sending me into funk, hip-hop and the blues, which always feels like a reference to my upbringing in Buffalo, the hometown of Rick James, Ani DiFranco and The Goo Goo Dolls.”
Growing up in Buffalo and first encountering music during the sermons his father, a pastor, would hold, Lewis went on to study clarinet at the age of 9 before progressing to the saxophone and learning melodies through playing Disney songs by ear. It is a musical upbringing that he had been increasingly focusing on over the past three years while he was studying for a Ph.D. at University of the Arts before it closed. Part autoethnography and part musicological study, the doctorate has seen Lewis look back at his creative life as a way of understanding the philosophy behind his music.
“It’s a behind the scenes of what a note is — the lived experience shaping and building your artistic DNA,” he says. “I always say that you can’t play about love if you’ve never experienced it and in the process of investigating my own process in recent years, it’s helped me understand how important it is to know yourself fully when it comes to making art.”
With his thesis complete and ambitions to publish his research, it might seem that Lewis has come to such an understanding of his own process that there is little left to discover. And yet, in typically restless fashion, his roster of forthcoming projects still reads like a list of references that only an endlessly curious mind could think up.
There is a new quartet record, Abstraction Is Deliverance, exploring Lewis’ rhizomatic “molecular systematic music” method through ballads and accompanying text from writer Teju Cole, plans for a new Red Lily Quintet record and another trio album, as well as a possible future project inspired by multi-reedist Eric Dolphy, which is still in its early stages.
“I’m always searching,” Lewis says after taking a pause. “The work never ends.”
And with that pronouncement, it’s time for him to pack up his saxophone and head back out onto the road, as later this evening he is due on stage in Philadelphia to play alongside yet another jazz great, Marshall Allen, as he celebrates his 101st birthday. It’s an apt pairing, as whether he is being garlanded with awards or not, it is difficult to shake the conviction that Lewis will spend the next decades carrying on much as Allen has done for the past 80 years, always looking for the next note and never failing to push forward the legacy of this great improvisatory tradition we call jazz. DB
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