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James Brandon Lewis - Divine Travels (2014) [Free Jazz, Improvisation]; FLAC (tracks+.cue)

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Mike1985
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James Brandon Lewis - Divine Travels (2014) [Free Jazz, Improvisation]; FLAC (tracks+.cue)

Unread postby Mike1985 » 05 Mar 2017, 11:03


Artist: James Brandon Lewis
Album: Divine Travels
Genre: Free Jazz, Improvisation
Label: Okeh Records
Released: 2014
Quality: FLAC (tracks+.cue)
Tracklist:
  1. Divine
  2. Desensitized
  3. Tradition
  4. The Preacher’s Baptist Beat
  5. Wading Child in The Motherless Water
  6. A Gathering Of Souls
  7. Enclosed
  8. No Wooden Nickels
  9. Organized Minorities
  10. Travels

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    Personnel:
  • James Brandon ewis - tenor saxophone
  • William Parker - bass
  • Gerald Cleaver - drums
  • Thomas Sayers Ellis - spoken word (4, 9)

Divine Travels, tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis’s second album, evokes an era when spiritualism and poetry were key elements of the jazz avant-garde, helping to signify its questing nature. A sanctified vibe animates much of this album, with the 30-year-old Buffalo, N.Y., native exploring age-old gospel melodies and his own folk-like motifs alongside two powerhouse veterans from the New York creative music scene: bassist William Parker and drummer Gerald Cleaver. Poet Thomas Sayers Ellis adds hip verse to two tracks, one channeling an image of the church and the appeal of its music (“The Preacher’s Baptist Beat”), the other dealing with race and shifting potential (“Organized Minorities”).

Above all, this is an album of song-in-speech and speech-in-song. Lewis has a natural feel for the rhythms of a sermon, using accessible hooks and incantatory repetition to capture and rouse—though he is just as likely to ruminate, as if singing from a hymnal to himself. He was raised in the church, so its sound is in his bones. Yet he left a gospel career, hearing jazz as his calling. Mentored at CalArts by the likes of Charlie Haden, Wadada Leo Smith and Alphonso Johnson, the saxophonist now lives in New York City, where he truly got religion when it comes to progressive music.

Divine Travels is leagues beyond Lewis’ callow 2010 self-released debut, Moments, an unfocused and unpromising disc that included lapses into too-smooth r&b. This new album has an altogether earthier, more organic aesthetic center, one that sets the saxophonist with a far greater challenge. He rises to it with a tone that has grit as well as polish, and his serrated riffing in “Desensitized” matches well with the beautifully authoritative rumble of Parker and Cleaver. Those two have not only played with avant icons of every stripe; they each have an unerring feel for African-American vernaculars and how to draw inspiration from them beyond cliché in free-jazz or, at least, jazz played freely.

The album’s high point is “Wading Child In The Motherless Water,” which commingles the spirituals “Wading In The Water” and “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” into a nearly 12-minute fantasia that taps a well of feeling as deep and wide as the Mississippi River. One does wish that Lewis’s Divine Travel s led to more ecstatic abandon. “A Gathering Of Souls” and “No Wooden Nickels” fade out just when things might have gotten really interesting. Here’s to hoping Lewis keeps maturing as a seeker, avoiding the lures and snares that might hold him earthbound.

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