James Brandon Lewis Quartet
msm Live
Intakt Records
★★★★★

FROM the first bursting notes of msm Live, recorded at Rote Fabrik, Zurich, here is a quartet messaging its music with an intense soulfulness and passion. Buffalo’s James Brandon Lewis’s tenor sax romps furiously over Aruan Ortiz’s Cuban pianism, Brad Jones’s delving bass and Chad Taylor’s omnipresent drums.

This is a double album sounding elemental in its immediacy. The opening tracks, A Lotus Speaks and Helix attack and assuage the ears with a complex emotional drive, Lewis’s penetrating hornsong like a human voice in its urgency, and Ortiz’s chords stoking Caribbean fire and rebellion.

This Swiss concert has the pent-up energy of four brilliant artistes setting their musicianship free after a year's pandemic hiatus. They play with a profound sense of release. The reflective timbre of First Importance carries a deep quality of longing, and Cesaire remembers how poetic words and sounds express a unity of beauty. Stunning!

Henry Lowther’s Still Waters
can’t believe, won’t believe
Village Life Records
★★★★★

STILL WATERS is a uniquely intergenerational band of British musicians led by octogenarians trumpeter Henry Lowther and bassist Dave Green, featuring tenor saxophonist Pete Hurt, pianist Barry Green and drummer Paul Clarvis.

The decades of sheer creative soundmaking mesh into a fivesome of powerful and original sounds who love each others’ skill and audacity.

Listen to the beautifully poised melodic tenderness of Mateja Sleeps — a serpentine lullaby with Green’s soft, luscious bass, Lowther’s balmy solo and Barry’s chipped-out notes. Or Clarvis’s scuttling drums on Lights of the North Circular and Hurt calling out his wares on the Finnish Saippuakauppias (Soap Vendor).

All the compositions are Lowther’s except Bernstein’s Some Other Time, which sounds almost like a vocal rendition as Lowther’s horn opening sings alongside Barry’s soft piano. Defiance of age, the embrace of younger and elder, and serene at that: a record to treasure and to relish.

Patricia Brennan
More Touch
Pyroclastic Records
★★★★★

PATRICIA BRENNAN is a young Mexican vibist and marimbist from Veracruz whose new album, More Touch, reveals a unique jazz sensibility and a powerfully indivisible musicianship.

Her quartet compadres — US drummer Marcus Gilmore and bassist Kim Cass with Cuban percussionist Mauricio Herrera — are a unique percussive foursome who incorporate Afro-Cuban and Mexican rhythmic undertows with the classical music grounding that Brennan studied at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music.

The essential unity of the Americas’ music is beautifully expressed in this album, hot with melody, rhythmic fire and improvisation. Hear the light and spinning radiance of Brennan's vibes on the reggae-grounded Unquiet Respect or the sense of Mexican transfiguration of El Nahualli (The Shadow Soul), so different from the track Robbin, dedicated to winter days in her husband’s home town in Maine.

The mystical qualities of Brennan’s music emerge from every groove of More Touch: new spirit, new sound.