RICHARD WORTH relishes the fleeting moment and sense of flow of the late, great saxophonist
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Jazz album reviews with CHRIS SEARLE: April 4, 2023
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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.
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