James Brandon Lewis "Eye of I" (Anti-, 2023)

One of the main reasons people love jazz is because it is a multi-layered music – since its tradition and heritage – and being so it offers a multi-layered experience of listening. Take for instance a multi-instrumentalist like Lao Dan from Dandong (China): he plays jazz with a post punk attitude, not mixing two different styles of music but bringing jazz out of the academia. In fact, he plays a music that is usually based on reflexion and inner listening into the realm of expressive urgency, even if what he plays remains jazz music (mostly and for the most part of it).

Something similar happens with the album Eye of I (Anti-, 2023) released by African American saxophonist James Brandon Lewis. In this case we have at least one ‘fusion’ of jazz with a completely different style – thanks to the Messthetics’ ‘jazz punk jam’ in the ending ‘Fear Not’ – but not only: all the album is a jazz album driven with the energy and the need to express something less elaborated than in the conservatory-trained musicians.

All is good until the moment in which you realise that Lewis, a solid player in the tradition of Coltrane whose –isms are unluckily solid as the tradition he echoes, is expanding his palette only to resemble others, clearly identifiable, hystorical musicians instead of try to find his own language. This way, you can run into the ‘Brotzmanisms’ of the 47 seconds of the machine gun-esque Middleground, or into the ‘Aylerisms’ of Eye of I – there’s also a guitar riff reminding the opening of Ayler’s The Last Album (Impulse!, 1969) – or again into the ‘Wareisms’ of the oblique melody of Womb Water (listen to the album David S. Ware released in 2010 by Amu Fidelity under the title of Onecept).

It is difficult to decide, after listening to this album in its entirety, if Lewis is only a true connoisseur/devotee to the history of the most innodic and/or confrontational free jazz or if the shadow of some craftiness is emanating from his personality, at this point in his career. Obviously one wants to believe that a musician who is trying to find his place into the jazz continuum, and not only into the market, making difficult choices like the one explained at the beginning of this review is something more than a smart guy. But playing jazz is also psychologically demanding since you don’t know where you will be at the end of your rhetorical constructions, so the need for solid ground can be tricky even if you are honest.

For the moment we can enjoy these pieces of music, and also the likes of Send Seraphic Being, a ballad tinged into the New York sound of the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, even if in listening to a piece like Within You Are Answers one can notice how much less adventurous JBL saxophone raids are in comparison to his models. Nonetheless this is an album that will be chatted, because Lewis is the kind of musician many people are wanting to hear in order to continue one of the most intriguing traditions into the jazz history, and because his aesthetic choiches are nontheless intriguing.