James Brandon Lewis: Jesup Wagon
Tao Forms

Jesup Wagon, the ninth album from tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, features the critically acclaimed firebrand fronting the inter-generational Red Lily Quintet. The playing alone commands attention—hardly a surprise when the leader's joined by cornetist Kirk Knuffke, cellist Chris Hoffman, bassist William Parker, and drummer Chad Taylor—but in rooting itself in an appreciation of the life and work of artist-botanist-musician-teacher George Washington Carver (1864-1943) the album also distinguishes itself conceptually. Absorbing the liner notes by Robin D. G. Kelley (author of the much-lauded biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original) while listening to the music makes for a thoroughly enriching experience.

Having embraced Carver's philosophy from a young age, Lewis conceived the album as a vehicle for rendering Carver's ideas and life into an earthy brand of avant-jazz informed by folk and blues feeling. Kelley's text provides historical context for Jesup Wagon as a whole but also for each of the seven tracks. His in-depth account of Carver's life encompasses more detail than can be accommodated here, but one that demands inclusion has to do with the Jesup Agricultural Wagon, the cover illustration of which was created by Carver himself (an archival photograph of same appears on the back panel). After he joined the faculty of the Tuskegee Institute, he fashioned in 1906 the wagon as a “movable school” equipped with products and tools from his laboratory that would bring innovative techniques, products, and knowledge to poor Southern farmers. However primitive the technology might appear by today's standards, Carver's idea speaks to the developmental process characteristic of science and art in the way contemporary practice evolves out of a specific tradition.

The band's playing is often incendiary. While Lewis doesn't ape those preceding him, echoes of others, including Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, can be heard in his saxophone sound. The backgrounds his partners bring to the quintet add inestimable depth to the project, with Parker, Hoffman, Taylor, and Knuffke drawing on experiences playing with icons such as Henry Threadgill, Butch Morris, and Cecil Taylor. Enhancing the instrumental presentation are two short recitations by Lewis, direct reminders of the story being told. In grounding each track in a specific aspect of Carver's life, the album assumes a programmatic quality, and again it's Kelley whose text establishes connections between the musical material and the historical background (unfortunately the proper sequence of the recited passages has been mixed up within those notes).

Lewis introduces the title track unaccompanied, his expressions blues-soaked and yearning, before the wagon sets forth with a funky New Orleans-styled marching groove peppered by a voluble Knuffke. The leader delivers his own incantatory statement as Taylor stokes fire alongside Lewis's honking. Loose, invigorated, and raw, the piece sets the tone for much of what follows. Funkier still is the African-inflected “Lowlands of Sorrow,” whose title derives from the words Carver used to describe the conditions of Macon County when he first surveyed the countryside as head of the Institute's Agriculture Department. With Parker adding gimbri and Hoffman cello plucks, Taylor channeling Ed Blackwell, and the horns seductively voicing a chanting melody, the tune takes on the character of spiritual jazz. Evoking Africa again whilst also referencing Carver's forward-thinking character, “Seer” sees Taylor setting drums aside for mbira and the horns playing Lewis's lyrical melodies in unison.

While “Arachis,” an elegy to arches hypogaea (Latin for peanut), initially slows the tempo for a mournful dirge, the pace picks up furiously after the intro, with Lewis roaring across a catapulting backdrop of bass and drums. Knuffke becomes Don Cherry to Lewis's Ornette as the cornetist weighs in and the music takes on an even freer spirit, Hoffman somehow making himself heard despite the cymbals and drums cartwheeling around him. More controlled by comparison is “Fallen Flowers,” necessarily so in order for clarity to be preserved when intricate counterpoint and short ostinato phrases are deployed. In keeping with a composition that references the regenerative properties of nature, Lewis muses poetically on life and death at track's end. “Chemurgy” concludes the release with another incantation, the horns here declaiming a “Lonely Woman”-styled theme until the leader weighs in with a final recitation. Throughout the set, elements come together to declare with no small amount of force that while Lewis is a player, composer, and conceptualist, he's also a storyteller gifted with an exceptionally fertile creative imagination.

June 2021