Years before James Brandon Lewis gained recognition as certainly one of jazz's strongest and expressive tenor saxophonists, he briefly believed he had found his calling within the church.
After graduating from Howard University in 2006 with a level in jazz studies, Lewis moved to Colorado, where he found lucrative employment within the gospel music scene. The work gave him spiritual achievement, but he felt limited in his creativity and realized he was still trapped within the mundane realities of the music business.
“I was in it because I had a relationship with God, and the only reason I didn't pursue that path was because I didn't see a lot of creative freedom there,” said Lewis, 41, who performs with The Messthetics at Felton Music Hall on Sept. 9 and on the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco on Sept. 10.
“I was just playing hymns and I enjoyed it. But at the same time, the gospel music industry is different from Sunday church. It's an industry like any other.”
Eager to spread his wings, Lewis enrolled in a graduate program at Cal Arts Valencia, where he met daring improvisers Charlie Haden and Wadada Leo Smith. He had a knack for networking with experienced masters, absorbing information and jazz knowledge as recent horizons opened up before him.
“When I spent time with Wadada, he talked about systematic music-making and his approach to composition,” Lewis recalled. “I realized that we know the standards, but we can also push the boundaries. There were all these incredible stories that I couldn't find out anywhere else, like talking to Charlie about his first encounter with Ornette Coleman,” the blues-loving alto saxophonist and composer whose rhythmic and harmonic concepts greatly expanded the language of jazz within the late Fifties.
Like a snowball accumulating more mass because it rolls down, Lewis has continued to soak up recent information and experiences while maintaining a sacred core to his sound. Following his George Washington Carver-inspired album Jesup Wagon, which was named one of the best album of the 12 months in a 2021 poll of leading jazz critics, Lewis and his Red Lily Quintet have released the extraordinary double CD For Mahalia, With Love in 2023, a wonderful tribute to gospel singing legend Mahalia Jackson.
Music critics will not be the one attentive listeners who’ve taken note of Lewis' music. Sonny Rollins, the 93-year-old titan of the tenor saxophone whose shadow isn’t any less imposing ten years after his retirement from the stage, has praised Lewis' creative abilities in spiritual terms.
“When I listen to you, I'm listening to Buddha, I'm listening to Confucius,” Rollins said. “I'm listening to the deeper meaning of life. You keep the world in balance.”
Although he keeps in contact with Rollins commonly, the blessing was “totally unexpected,” Lewis said. But he has actively sought out renowned artists known for creating expansive musical worlds, corresponding to bassist/composer William Parker, who leads Lewis' Red Lily Quintet.
Lewis returns to the Bay Area not as a bandleader but as a catalyst in The Messthetics, the Washington, DC-based trio consisting of bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty, the rhythm team of legendary punk band Fugazi, and guitarist Anthony Pirog.
Lewis and Pirog, a musician who can't be categorized and infrequently works in a setting where jazz, rock and recent music collide, met a couple of decade ago at a gig in New York led by drummer William Hooker. They became friends immediately. Pirog toured Europe with Lewis' band “and always made me feel like whatever I wanted to contribute was the best,” Pirog said.
When Lewis signed to the ANTI- label in 2022, he featured The Messthetics on his first single, the blistering track “Fear Not,” and when he sat down with the trio at New York City’s Winter Jazzfest the next 12 months, “he was a perfect fit for the band energetically,” Pirog said.
The collaboration got here into full effect with the discharge of the album “The Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis” in March on Impulse!, a label inextricably linked to musical exploration. As a quartet, the group now covers the whole lot from the crisp funk of “That Thing” to the sublime lyricism of “Boatly.”
“I've always liked the combination of guitar and saxophone, starting with Sonny Rollins and Jim Hall,” said Pirog. “It's also a big theme in surf music.”
Lewis collaborates with one other extraordinary guitarist on September 22 on the SFJAZZ Center as a special guest to have a good time the seventieth birthday of Marc Ribot, best referred to as a palette-expanding muse for artists corresponding to John Zorn, Tom Waits and Elvis Costello.
“I'm saying something that everyone knows by now,” Ribot said. “James is one of the greatest saxophonists, if not the greatest tenor player of our time.”
JAMES BRANDON LEWIS
With the Messthetics: September 9, 8 p.m., Felton Music Hall, Felton; $22-$37; www.feltonmusichall.com; September 10, 8 p.m., Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco; $20; rickshawstop.com
Celebration of Marc Ribot’s seventieth birthday: September 22, 7:00 p.m.; SFJAZZ Center; San Francisco; $25-$95; www.sfjazz.or
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