Last year tenor saxist James Brandon Lewis released an impressive Divine Travels that spotlighted his strong tone in a forward thinking atmosphere. This time around, he doesn’t take a step forward or back, but sideways as he mixes jazz with hip hop with only the accompaniment Jamaaladeen Tacuma/eb and Rudy Royston/dr on a sonic journey/biography. Along with beat poetry on a number of tracks as seques and introductions, Lewis and company deliver concise pieces with Spartan clarity, melding a feel of vintage hard bop with modern urban rhythms. Lewis rich tone is a throw back to the days of big-sounding guys like Dexter Gordon and Coleman Hawkins, but what he does with it is bring it up to the modern rhythmic ideom, making pieces such as “Bamako Love” and “Boom Bap Bap” sound like bebop for the 21 st Century. The vignettes interspersed give a “relevant” feel to the music, making the album a seamless concept of sorts.
This is the second disc I’ve heard of his, and both have been impressively ambitious.
Okeh Records