James Brandon Lewis/Red Lily Quintet at Alphabet City - What A Couple of Nights!

September 2021 marked the 17th year that City of Asylum staged a Poetry and Jazz Forum. What began as a one-night event that brought exiled Chinese poet Huang Xiang and saxophonist Oliver Lake together for a performance has grown in recent years to a month-long series with music and poetry comingling in CoA's brick and mortar space Alphabet City. This year's installment wrapped up last week with one of the most incredible performances I've witnessed in several years. 

I don't say that lightly either.

James Brandon Lewis' Red Lily Quintet released Jesup Wagon earlier this year. This tribute to the life and work of George Washington Carver will likely end up on a lot of Best of lists in a few months. (Click here for a review of it.) On September 28, Lewis and the Quintet performed several tracks from the album at Alphabet City. The following night, he and cellist Chris Hoffman performed duets and accompanied three poets reading their works.

Before the Tuesday night set began, Lewis told the audience he wasn't the leader of the band. "I'm just a vessel." He also added that, thanks to the pandemic, this was only the second time the quintet had been able to play this music live. That being the case, everyone played like they had stored up a wealth of energy and musical ideas and couldn't wait to let them out. 

The set started with "Chemurgy," named for a movement George Washington Carver spearheaded in the 1930s to find industrial uses for renewable resources. The melody, with a phrase or two similar in a way to Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" featured William Parker starting off on the gimbri, creating some low melodic interplay with Hoffman's cello. The rousing coda had Lewis blowing some low wails while cornetist Kirk Knuffke answered in his upper register. 

Throughout the set, Lewis went deep into his horn for complex solos that combined the visceral frenzy of free jazz without ever forsaking a melodic foundation. It reminded me of some of the masters of tenor saxophone I've heard on recordings and live over the last 30 years, but there's no sense in namedropping here. Lewis is clearly his own person, driven by the desire to get these ideas out of his head and into his instrument. 

Drummer Chad Taylor was pushing things along, responding to the other players and challenging them to take it higher. It was clear there was electricity onstage. During Knuffke's solo in "Lowlands of Sorrow," Lewis leaned his head back and wailed. It wasn't for attention. He was caught in the moment. My first thought was - Okay, good to know it's not just me feeling this way. "Arachnis" was a rather melancholic ballad, but the rhythm was so energetic that it felt uplifting. And Lewis' solo could have continued all night and it would have been just as powerful. 

I almost didn't make it to the Tuesday night show but a scheduling mishap opened my evening, so I jumped on it. In retrospect, it was a lucky break because the Red Lily Quintet's set was the most moving thing I've seen since Mike Reed premiered the set of music that became the Flesh and Bone album at the 2017 Winter Jazz Festival. (Click here for info about the release of that music.) If I had missed the show last Tuesday, I feel like I would've missed the boat on a great leap forward in music. I've gone online telling people to put all their stock in Lewis and that evening was proof positive of that. He has an individual, fully-matured voice. 

William Parker, James Brandon Lewis and Kirk Knuffke,
from the video screen on the corner seating area at Alphabet City

The morning after the Red Lily show, I went online talking up Lewis, giving that night's set a hard sell. Usually such praise never gets a reaction but I wasn't pleasantly surprised at the end of the Wednesday show to discover that I was seated next to a guy who went to school with me, from about 3rd grade on, and whom I hadn't seen since we graduated 30-plus years ago. He and his wife checked it out based on my endorsement, which was really cool to see.

It would be hard to follow Tuesday night, but Lewis and Hoffman really got into the feeling that night. Lewis added his own spoken word pieces to the music, full of verbal snippets that recalled the quick burst of Beat poets with modern observations and concern, no doubt fueled by the past 18 months. Taking a title from his own album, the saxophonist put words to An Unruly Manifesto, a personal declaration inspired by similar ones put forth by poets like Ted Joans and other musicians. 

Lewis was modest to the point of self-deprecating about his own literary work but there were passages where his words hit hard. "Self-Doubt of a 21-Year Old Reed" expressed a musician's uncertainty: "Not II-V-I enough...Not MFA, BFA or 'street' enough." Another featured the moving observation, "W is for War, not 'When Will This End.'" Hoffman held down the foundation on a lot of the music, plucking his instrument, walking fast and bowing some heavy double-stops. Lewis did plenty of speaking, but his still let his horn do the lion's share of the talking, for most of the set. Like the night before, it was an ideal balance of explosive honks and reflective lines.

 

For the second half of the show, Lewis and Hoffman accompanied readings by Joel Dias-Porter (seen above), Danielle Obisie-Orlu and M. Soledad Caballero. All three are strong writers, with Dias-Porter creating as especially compelling piece called "El Magnifico," which recalled the day in his youth when he heard about Roberto Clemente's death. The musicians interacted with the readings very effectively, holding back to elevate the words and not overpower them. The way each piece ended, with words and music concluding in tandem, proved there was effort put into the word, rather than merely improvisation behind them. 

The evening concluded with a tenor/cello reading of "Even the Sparrow" a Lewis original commissioned by the Jazz Coalition which the quintet had also played at the end of the previous evening. As things wrapped up, Abby Lembersky, the City of Asylum Director of Programs, told the audience - which included online viewers - that she hoped that everyone got something from the month's programming that they will take with home them. Two words can sum up the feeling on that idea - no doubt.