Boyce Justice Griffith: The Point
Outside in Music

The affection NYC-based saxophonist Boyce Justice Griffith has for his forebears and jazz's evolutionary periods is palpably felt throughout The Point, a concept album that perpetuates and builds on 2024's Tuning In. The new set features the same stellar line-up from the earlier one (though a separate quartet of musicians joined him on two of its five tracks), with the leader joined by trumpeter Anthony Hervey, pianist Isaiah J. Thompson, bassist Marty Jaffe, and drummer John Sturino. Griffith's acoustic quintet is as comfortable operating in be-bop and hard bop idioms as those associated with classic ‘60s outfits. However different the eleven tracks might be, classic swing and the blues are the foundation.

To be clear, Griffith makes no bones about his debt to the musical legacy he's inherited. He's as quick to emphasize, however, that he's not out to imitate the past but instead impose his personal stamp on the music he loves. The result is material that connects to jazz history but eschews mimicry for expressions of authenticity and integrity. There's nothing cynical or ironic about his playing; on the contrary, the love he has for the milieu he's operating within is clear at every moment. To that end, he's gathered around himself like-minded partners, each of them proficient and tasteful players whose advanced musicianship makes Griffith's music better. This is a unit that grooves hard when necessary but can also ruminate sensitively.

Rather than simply string unrelated tracks together, he's instead organized the album around a concept having to do with core values and spiritual themes, and in that regard The Point extends the conceptual sensibility of A Love Supreme to the present day. The gamut of human emotion and experience is touched upon when exuberant expressions of joy rub shoulders with ones of introspection and melancholy. Such an album title naturally alludes to inward probing, reflections on the point of it all, and questions having to do with goals, values, and commitments. Giving musical form to that process, Griffith inserts four variations on the title track into the set to suggest how different things appear when seen at separate stages of life.

Griffith and company pay seeming homage to Coltrane's classic quartet in the rubato intro to “The Two Fish” with sweeping flourishes of soprano sax, piano, bass, and drums, and with the warm, reverential tone of the leader's sax drawing the listener into the performance right away. With Jaffe animating the tune thereafter with a muscular line, the performance turns soulful, bluesy, and deep, the only thing puzzling about the modal jazz-styled piece being its enigmatic title (a side-long reference to David Wallace Foster's This is Water perhaps?). All four participants show themselves to be wholly conversant with the style Coltrane perfected over the course of many albums. Speaking of literary references, the title of “Balrog” would seem to nod to a monstrous creature in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, even if the bluesy swing of the piece itself would seem to suggest a being less threatening.

Things turn breezy for the lithe post-bop of “The Point - Part One,” with Harvey joining the leader on the front-line and delivering the tune's first solo and a blustery, florid, and incendiary one at that. Echoes of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie naturally spring to mind when Harvey and a mute-wearing Griffith dig into the intricate melodic patterns of “The State of Being” and when Jaffe 'walks,' Sturino drives the band, and Thompson sprinkles the performance with block chords. Griffith's saxophone prowess is evident throughout, thought not self-indulgently. He powers “The Point - Part Two (Development)” and “Something to Prove” aggressively on tenor, to cite two examples, but his attack is wholly appropriate to the high-velocity and swagger of the material.

Changing gears, “Isolation” finds the band burrowing deeply into ballad mode with emotional outpourings that genuinely do communicate loneliness and anguish. Another left turn's taken when “The Walk” sees the quintet moving into soulful and funkier territory, the kind of thing one might encounter on a ‘60s Blue Note date. Relaxed by comparison is the aptly named “At Home,” which sees the group luxuriating in its lightly swinging groove with delight (witness the joy with which the front-liners trade off as the track winds down). To be sure, The Point is neither iconoclastic nor revolutionary, but creating something of that kind was never Griffith's intention. In locking into the enduring traditions of acoustic jazz, he instead wanted to give voice to human experience in its broadest terms and explore in instrumental form existential issues we all wrestle with at different times in our lives. On the level of performance, it's a thoroughly satisfying set; factor in the extra conceptual dimension and the recording resonates all the more.

March 2025