UGLY BEAUTY: THE MONTH IN JAZZ — June 2026
James Brandon Lewis Is Here To Testify
James Brandon Lewis gives the impression of being wise beyond his years, but he’s got just as
many questions as anybody else. The son of a minister, he grew up in Buffalo, NY, and attended
Howard University. After graduation in 2006, he moved to Colorado, where he spent several
years as a gospel musician. In 2010, he began attending CalArts, studying with Wadada Leo
Smith, Charlie Haden and others, and releasing an independent album, Moments. After
receiving his MFA, he moved to New York and began working with Matthew Shipp, William
Parker, and Gerald Cleaver, among others. He released Divine Travels in 2014, and hasn’t
stopped moving since.
Lewis’s discography is broad, and scattered across multiple labels, from the major imprint Okeh
to tiny European indies. He changes personnel often, working in all sorts of contexts. But since
2018, one of his strongest creative relationships has been with drummer Chad Taylor.
“I first saw Chad Taylor playing with Cooper-Moore in maybe 2014,” Lewis recalled in a 2021
interview with Troy Collins. “Anyway, we began collaborating after I did arrangements of
Coltrane tunes for a solo saxophone marathon in Philly some time ago, and then decided to use
those arrangements for our duo, which we recorded as our first album Radiant Imprints.”
That album, recorded in January 2017 at Park West Studios in Brooklyn, was released the
following year. In its wake, the two performed in Austria, recording the album Live In Willisau,
which included a version of “Willisee,” a piece from the 1985 Dewey Redman/Ed Blackwell
album Red And Black In Willisau.
“My love for the duo recording Red And Black by Dewey Redman and Ed Blackwell, as well
as Chad Taylor’s love for that recording, sparked our own duo and further cemented our
dedication to the depth of exploration of the duo format,” Lewis told Collins. He added, “Chad
has a high level of melodic lines via the drums and it inspires me. Also, his use of mbira adds to
his overall artistry in very dynamic ways. His versatility in knowing many musical genres allows
me to draw from multiple influences within my own experience, giving me ultimate freedom.”
In 2020, Lewis invited Taylor, bassist Brad Jones, and pianist Aruán Ortiz to join him in a new
quartet project. The goal with this band, separate from all his other groups, was to explore a set
of compositional principles Lewis refers to as Molecular Systematic Music. In a 2020 essay, he
explained the theory behind it: that the sum of what a musician has heard in their life is the
DNA of what they will play on their chosen instrument. “MSM offers musicians a way to
discover their own musical DNA by examining their prior musical experiences, yielding a chart in
the form of a ‘molecule’ which may then be used to generate ideas for composition and
improvisation.”
Over the course of five studio albums and a double live CD, Lewis has used the theories of
Molecular Systematic Music to compose more than 40 pieces, some of which are clearly linked
(there are compositions simply called “Per 1” through “Per 7” on the group’s first four studio
albums) but all of which fit together somehow, forming a single body of work.
“I think that for the quartet specifically, outside of all my other groups, there’s clearly a
language that we’ve built over time,” Lewis told me recently, while on tour with the
Messthetics (guitarist Anthony Pirog and bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty, both ex-
Fugazi). “And I’ve never really shown them. Chad’s seen the molecule, and seen how I’ve been
building the music over the years. But Aruán and Brad, I just kind of like... I still write in Western
notation for the group.”
Lewis explained the molecule to me as a set of 17 six- or seven-note scales. “But it's not modal
music. It’s not even coming from that perspective. Basically, I built a molecule for myself years
ago that draws inferences between molecular biology and music nomenclature. And then
basically [serves] as a structure mapping engine, an analogy or metaphoric concept where you
have two things... and then you keep drawing inferences between the two until they become
one.” He says that even five albums deep, he’s still only scratching the surface of MSM’s
potential, that his system is “built in a very specific, idiosyncratic way, and really most of the
albums only cover maybe one of those, or maybe two or three of those scales. So it’s really... a
life’s work, really, how I’m building on it.”
https://jamesbrandonlewis.bandcamp.com/track/the-sermon
The latest quartet album, Omni, is something of a musical sequel to their 2024 release,
Transfiguration: “I’m now using the other, what you would call in the context of my system the
negative space, which is the other six notes [of a 12-tone scale]. So it’s really catering to this
idea of atonal music, but it’s my own take on it. So it’s not like Schoenberg or nothing like that.
...
