Free to the Core | Interview with James Brandon Lewis

T ouring musicians value their downtime. Rest, relaxation and conversation among band members are important, regardless of the rites of hotel room scales and time- stretch soundchecks. When they were gigging in 2018, saxophonist James Brandon Lewis pulled apart one particular subject with drummer Chad Taylor and bass guitarist Josh Werner that would have a major bearing on their future work.  

“On the road, you spend time talking about different players that have influenced you, different vibes and so on and so forth,” he says. ”At the time, I was reading Amiri Baraka’s ‘Apple Cores’, his regular columns in DownBeat magazine, and it was something that came up for discussion. “He covers, in the most respectful way, the music on the fringes: you know, free jazz, avant-garde, or whatever you want to call it. And when I stumbled across these columns, I was just truly inspired  and taken aback by them, firstly just for the range of insights he had.”  

Lewis, in duo with poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, opened for a Baraka performance in 2013 at St. Mark’s Church in New York, and the idea of making music in his honour a decade later “just felt right.” The saxophonist’s latest album, on which his trio blends fluid and fixed form, loose meters and tight backbeats, and themes that are tender and torrid, is entitled Apple Cores. These are words with historical weight.  

An esteemed writer, critic and activist, Baraka was one of the key spearheads of independent black culture and post-Civil Rights politics, championing among others, mid-1960s innovators such as John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, artists who have all struck a chord with Lewis.  

A member of the band led by the last of those three icons that featured in the articles also excited him; Don Cherry. Lewis had been a disciple for some time, reprising the trumpeter’s enchanting ‘Bamako Love’ on his 2015 set Days of Freeman, and on Apple Cores the saxophonist unites the spirits of Cherry and Baraka, both embodiments of the maverick music-making and thinking to which he fully relates.  

”Don was just always curious and really pushing the envelope, whether it’s quote unquote ‘world music’, or rapping on some of his albums,” says Lewis, who, in the past 15 years has excelled at the crossroads of many schools in jazz, be they ‘in’ or ‘out’. “I felt that it was fitting to honour that on this recording. Also I think I’ve only been a handshake away from Don Cherry, meaning I’ve played with Hamid Drake and William Parker over the years, and they both played with Don.”  

Indeed the six degrees of separation were even more apparent in Lewis’s educational path. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York state, the 42 year-old, whose robust, flinty tone on tenor and improvisational vigour and subtlety have made him a notable contemporary exponent of the instrument, attended Howard University in Washington, focusing on gospel traditions, and then went on to Cal Arts, where one of his tutors was double bassist Charlie Haden, a colleague of Cherry’s in Ornette Coleman’s iconic 1950s group, and who also featured on  the trumpeter’s eclectic 1970s classics Relativity Suite and  Brown Rice. These connections may have made Lewis feel closer to Cherry, but of even greater significance was a common outlook on music without borders. One of the great sound adventurers of the 20th century, Don Cherry played in numerous contexts, evolving into a vibrant, vivid, unpredictable musical chameleon, as happy to commune with Turkish or Indian percussionists as he was to trade quick-fire ideas with German avant-garde vibraphonist Karl Berger, and riff rowdily with British Afro-punk-funk combo Rip, Rig & Panic. Cherry reached far and wide.  

Lewis has also been willfully eclectic in his career to date, and in addition to his electric trio, he has growled on gritty rock ground with The Messthetics, made his Molecular Quartet a vehicle for conceptually advanced composition, and taken a deep dive into the music of gospel icon Mahalia Jackson with his Red Lily Quintet.  Furthermore, Lewis also plays in multi-disciplinary projects such as Heroes Are Gangleaders, a collaborative ensemble, featuring poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, which was conceived in homage of Amiri Baraka. Past voices remained present.  This investigation of myriad artistic worlds may be an essential bond between Lewis and Cherry, but their desire to embrace pop as well as art music was also integral to the outlook of Baraka, who forcefully advocated for R&B as much as he did the avant-garde, and quite tellingly made an important contribution to I Plan To Stay A Believer, bassist William Parker’s 2010 tribute to soul legend Curtis Mayfield.  

Lewis, who is deeply inspired by and has covered the music of Donny Hathaway, one of Mayfield’s major scions, actively avoids sectarian attitudes with regard to genres. He keeps a key to an open house. “I’m always flirting with these different forms of, of what you would call black music,” he explains. “To make sure the conversation isn’t myopic, that it’s a broad expansion, just updating the conversation.” The trio has been a kind of Mothership for Lewis throughout his career, from early bands with Parker on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums to later iterations with Luke Stewart and Warren G. Trae Crudup III to the current unit with Josh Werner and Chad Taylor, in those respective roles. Lewis first played in the format at a residency in Florida hosted by the late saxophonist Sam Rivers, another major trailblazer of the 1960s. Modern day piano giant Matthew Shipp curated sessions. “He asked me if I had ever just played with bass and, drums and I said no, so he brought in Michael Welch and Doug Matthews, who played with Sam [Rivers] in his trio in Florida where he had remained until his death.

“When playing with them I had the experience of feeling like there weren’t any chains on my melodic line,” Lewis explains, his voice now clearly raised for emphasis. “I was free to go wherever the inspiration or the line would take me. And so it was such a freeing and profound moment for me because I could create without the accompaniment of a pianist leading me a certain way, or guitars leading me a certain way, accompanying me, or, directing where the ship is supposed to be going. But now I could be in charge of what that conversation would look like. I felt like my creative ideas were endless. “With all the trio explorations I’ve done, I definitely feel more comfortable in the format. At first it was daunting because a lot of the improvisation responsibilities are on me. Of course we split up solos and the drums are obviously not static, but I had to get used to it.” Although the saxophone trio generally means an unplugged band, as in the Rollins-Henderson-Lovano models, Lewis has had both acoustic and electric players in his version of the three-piece, and is well aware of how problematic that choice can be for some critics and audiences.  

“Over the years, I’ve gone from Divine Travels, with acoustic bass featuring poetry, to Days of Freeman, with a group more oriented to funk and hip-hop,” he adds. “Then I followed that up with No Filter in the same way, just capturing electric energy and vibes. And so I think the shape of it has changed, but in general, it’s kind of remained the same idea with electric bass.  "In jazz, just because it’s electrified doesn’t mean it lacks purity. Those kinds of conversations always baffle me, sometimes you get the sense people think the music is somehow a lesser thing than when it’s acoustic, and I just don’t hear that.”  

This sonic openness is matched by cultural expansion on Apple Cores. On one hand it is very much a James Brandon Lewis trio set that has the trademark punch and heft of previous works insofar as it has brawny, heavy funk-rock riffs; as well as more tantalising, fragmented structures, full of space and shadowy reverb bearing the stamp of both electronica and dub, which is interesting given that bassist Josh Werner worked with the late, great Jamaican mixmaster Lee 'Scratch' Perry. Yet drummer Chad Taylor, with whom Lewis has had a longstanding duo, brings to the table an instrument that would have surely charmed the ears of Perry and Cherry, who substantially engaged with African music: the mbira, a thumb piano from Zimbabwe, a small metallic device with a double fingerboard that produces rich, thick timbres. This non-Western instrument, with its unique character is used to fine effect on the slightly reggae-ish, spacious groove of ‘Prince Eugene’.

“It really adds depth,” Lewis says of the mbira. “When you see the way Chad is using it, and it’s inspiring. It’s quite a challenge to play. "It’s in a different tuning, and Chad has several mbiras that are all tuned their own way. I have the privilege to have it on this record…. he’s worked with it on our duo records, but we thought it would be a great fit to bring that into the fold on this trio album.” The journey Lewis has taken into Cherry’s singular world has also led him to discover more about the major role played by the trumpeter’s partner Moki, a great visual artist, who created eye-catching works that complemented his songs, above all the tapestries and quilts reproduced on many of his album sleeves. Some covers have such ecstatic polychrome shapes that they form changing timbres for the eye to match the moving pictures for the ear created by the music. In parallel, Lewis has also been researching the ingenious writing of poet/spoken word artist Jayne Cortez, the woman who was the former wife of Cherry’s musical kith and kin Ornette Coleman.  

“I came across an anthology she worked on in the 1980s, Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination, where she includes writings of Ornette – and it was really just amazing surrealist work,” says Lewis.  

Cortez was also a recording artist, whose band featured Coleman alumnus, bass legend Jamaladeen Tacuma, and her life loosely parallels that of Moki Cherry insofar as they were women who often stood in the shadow of their more famous male partners, even though they were significant creative forces to be reckoned with.  In recent years there has been greater recognition of Moki’s talent, by way of Organic Music Societies, an international exhibition curated by Blank Forms Editions which celebrated Moki and Don as equal creative spirits. This was followed by a handsome book with illustrations, photographs, diary entries, poetry and stories, charting these two unique individuals.  

With that in mind it comes as no surprise that Apple Cores features the pieces, ‘Remember Brooklyn & Moki’, with the place name referring to Cherry’s 1969 album Where Is Brooklyn?, and ‘Don’t Forget Jayne’, a self-explanatory call to give Cortez her yesterday’s dues today.

“I’m slowly learning Moki’s story and discovering her cover designs and who she was as a person,” Lewis says. “And Jayne Cortez is someone I’ve been knowing about for quite some time. One of my favourite records is by her with Richard Davis [Celebrations & Solitudes: The Poetry of Jayne Cortez & Richard Davis, Bassist on Strata-East – Ed]. And so I felt like it was important to talk about her, and I just kind of used my imagination, thinking that, at one point they, Jayne and Moki, maybe they were both hanging together. “One of my favourite things that I always post when I’m irritated with the world is a clip of Jayne Cortez with her son Denardo Coleman, where she’s reciting a poem. And the poem simply says, 'Find your own voice and use it, use your own voice and find it.’

 “Such a short clip is so powerful when you think about it, just because of that old saying the world wants you to be everything but who you are,” he continues. “So I felt it was necessary for me to feature them and to point towards them as artists, as individuals in their own right.” Needless to say the recognition of women whose talent has been eclipsed by lionised men is an issue that has far-reaching historical roots in numerous genres apart from jazz, but Lewis is aware of the growing festoon of flowers being given to tour de force female artists.

“Yeah, in the same way that we now are finally acknowledging the magnitude of who Alice Coltrane was as a person. That she was not just a wife,” he states. “And we need them [those women], and we need art more now than ever. We need art so that we can continue to learn how to be inclusive rather than divisive, and, yes, especially at this point in time.”

The James Brandon Lewis trio play the Jazz Arena, Cheltenham Jazz Festival on 4 May at 12.30pm

This article originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Jazzwise – Subscribe Today