Album of the Month: James Brandon Lewis Trio – Apple Cores

Chasing energy, honouring history, and deconstructing everything in between.

James Brandon Lewis doesn't take the easy road. Having forged a singular sound on the tenor saxophone, one that DownBeat recently recognised by naming him their Rising Star Artist and Composer of the Year, he could simply showcase his brawny tone in comfortable settings. Instead, Lewis continues to challenge himself, his collaborators, and his audience. Apple Cores, released in February 2025 on ANTI-, is the latest evidence of a restless musical intelligence that refuses to be confined by genre, tradition, or expectation.

The Molecular Systematic Approach

In a 2020 essay titled "Molecular Synthetic Music", Lewis articulated his approach to composition and performance: attempting to deconstruct widely accepted approaches to musical form, theory, and performance practice in favour of an individualised music rooted in abstraction. He describes it as playing with music as if putting together a broken glass bottle. Like John Coltrane and Charles Mingus before him, Lewis has constructed a trademark sound vastly distinct from anyone in his generation.

Apple Cores embodies this philosophy completely. The album was created over two intense, entirely improvised sessions with longtime collaborators Chad Taylor (drums and mbira) and Josh Werner (bass and guitar). Every track except one emerged from pure collective spontaneity, yet you'd be hard-pressed to tell this from the music's razor-sharp focus. "If you don’t spend time with your band, you’re not going to really trust that moment," Lewis explains. "I think we’ve spent enough time together to where we can do that. I’ve been playing Chad for like 10 years, so that’s like water right there and me and Josh have been playing together since like 2018."

Honouring the Ancestors

The album takes its name from a series of columns that poet and jazz theorist Amiri Baraka wrote for DownBeat magazine in the 1960s. Lewis first encountered Baraka's work at Howard University (also Baraka's alma mater), where Blues People, Baraka's groundbreaking 1963 study of Black American music, was required reading. "I'm always in constant dialogue with his work," Lewis says.

But whilst named after Baraka, the album's true conceptual centre is trumpeter and multi-instrumentalist Don Cherry. Lewis designed each song title as a cryptogram of sorts, making subtle references to Cherry's life and music. "The record itself is a nod to Amiri but mainly a nod to Don Cherry, using Amiri as a branch to really get the conversation going," Lewis explains. "It’s not a tribute in the sense that we’re playing Don Cherry compositions, but that the music is commenting on his musical curiosity."

That curiosity, that refusal to be bound by convention, is precisely what Lewis draws from Cherry's legacy. "Just thinking about all of the different influences that Don Cherry opened himself up to,” Lewis said. “That should be a regular example of how to remain curious. My slogan with the trio is that I’m chasing energy, and that energy can be any type. This joint is hittin’ and I hope people receive it that way.”

The Energy Chase

"Apple Cores #1" kicks off with a plucky, head-nodding groove that immediately establishes the album's aesthetic: hip-hop meets bebop meets avant-garde, all locked into a hermetically sealed rhythmic pocket. Taylor and Werner land somewhere between heavy prog stomp and hip-hop beats, pummelling away Dennis Chambers-style to create massive machinery for Lewis to unfurl his most melodic, bluesy lines. He blows with conviction and power, substantiating comparisons to Joe Henderson and David S. Ware, stringing together ever silkier melodies whilst stopping short of the sky-tearing licks that characterise his work with The Messthetics.

"Prince Eugene" shifts the energy entirely. A hazy ballad combining dub-reggae bassline, Zimbabwean mbira, and Taylor's hand drums creates a vaguely overcast Afrobeat vibe. Lewis's saxophone sings through the heavy, minimal groove, diffusing the opener's cadenced heft into looser structures and syncopations. The clocklike tones of Taylor's marimba dance along Werner's blooming undertow and wah-wahs whilst Lewis articulates a series of poignant phrases.

Midway through, "Remember Brooklyn & Moki" conjures a dark, atmospheric tone as the band pays tribute to Don Cherry's wife, the Swedish interdisciplinary artist Moki Cherry, and one of Don's most beloved albums, 1969's Where Is Brooklyn?. The vibrations of shakers and hand drums form a texture whilst Lewis explores the space with both melodicism and abstract sound exploration.

The Cryptograms

"Five Spots to Caravan" is a multi-layered reference to Cherry's creative arc. The title nods to New York's famed Five Spot where Ornette Coleman made his New York City debut in autumn 1959 alongside Cherry, with Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden, a residency that signalled the arrival of Coleman's radical avant-garde experiments to jazz's mainstream. The "caravan" references the Caravan of Dreams performing arts centre in Coleman's hometown, Fort Worth, Texas. Musically, the track bristles with nervous skronk floating over insistently cyclical, hammered-out drum patterns and plump electric bass.

"Broken Shadows" is the album's sole cover, an inspired take on Ornette Coleman's 1971 composition, complete with snaking melodies and a faint trace of Middle Eastern modes. It feels like a chase scene down a desolate corridor, pulsating drums and almost eerie saxophone creating an atmosphere of frantic intensity before rolling back to a smooth ending.

"Don't Forget Jayne", dedicated to poet Jayne Cortez, emerges robed in glorious spiritual jazz of the Alice and John Coltrane sort. The flowing balladry showcases Lewis at his most lyrical, blowing with David Murray-calibre intensity whilst maintaining a sense of spacious reverence. It's worth the price of admission alone, a soliloquising saxophone piece that moves into near-trancelike territory.

"D.C. Got Pocket" momentarily resembles Zamrock's heady psychedelia only to untether and become a pulsating avant-jazz thing. It's the funkiest track on the album, leftward funk with hypnotic bass and heavy ghost-note-laden drumming that captures the trio at their most locked-in and groove-oriented.

The Triumph of Spontaneity

What makes Apple Cores remarkable is how it sounds nothing like an entirely improvised album. The trio's real triumph is found in the elegant way they connect disparate threads, shaping a close-knit, immensely enjoyable whole from what could easily have been fragmentary explorations. The album's three "Apple Cores" pieces act as pillars throughout the running order, each demonstrating Lewis's clever movement up and down the scales whilst the rhythm section creates different frameworks for his explorations.

Taylor's drumming deserves special mention. It's Ronald Shannon Jackson-like when the beat is at its heaviest, compelling and precisely placed. Werner's contributions on both bass and guitar add layers of texture, from trip-hop bass-driven foundations to wah-drenched guitar flourishes. Together they create a sonic landscape that's both muscular and nuanced, propulsive and atmospheric.

Beyond Category

Apple Cores sits somewhere between mainstream contemporary jazz and the resurgence of jazz-influenced post-rock and avant-prog. Lewis operates with feet firmly planted in both worlds. He lives between classical jazz improvisation and angular experimentation based on reggae, dub, and hip-hop. His recent collaboration with Fugazi's Brendan Canty and Joe Lally as The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis further cemented his status as an explorer of sound, bringing to life the dark corners of the self through careful deconstruction.

But where that album channelled punk's explosive energy into jazz frameworks, Apple Cores transmutes that intensity into soulful groove. It's less a traditional jazz album and more an experimentation with rhythm and sound. The long-form pieces toy with what's possible in musical composition whilst the shorter interludes provide breathing space and textural variation.

The album exudes an aura of pure adrenaline that perfectly captures images of grimy subway cars and treacherous streets, frantic and urgent at times, serene and contemplative at others. Yet it never forgets where it came from. Lewis issues a challenge to his peers and listeners: we must continue to keep jazz's long and storied history close to our hearts and minds. By doing this, we can keep the innovations of our forebears alive, enriching our present-day experiences along the way.

James Brandon Lewis represents a vital thread in contemporary jazz. As open-minded a musician as they come, he has spent the past two years alone reimagining Mahalia Jackson's gospel tunes in a contemporary jazz key (For Mahalia, With Love), exploring the aggressive edges of free jazz (Eye Of I), and diving into muscular fusion with The Messthetics. He's forged a singular sound that honours tradition whilst refusing to be bound by it.

Apple Cores picks up where his 2015 album Days of FreeMan left off, carrying forward ideas about abstraction, improvisation, and the deconstruction of jazz's accepted approaches. But it also stands as its own statement, a document of three musicians so attuned to each other that they can create focused, compelling music entirely in the moment.

The fact that each track has its own unique identity despite being entirely improvisational is a feat in itself. The trio manages to entice without ever sounding redundant. They want to capture the spur-of-the-moment decisions that tie us back to our influences. What they want is to immortalise ideas, and Apple Cores does this with flying colours.

The sonic capture is brilliant, allowing Taylor's compelling drumming and Lewis's powerful saxophone to occupy their own spaces whilst Werner's bass and guitar provide the glue. It's chaotically organised, like a raging storm set on a certain path with no detours. The almost story-like aspect of the numbered "Apple Cores" pieces constructs a wordless narrative that's easy to get lost in.

In a strange way, the unfamiliar, jagged territories in which the trio ventures might be where they've always belonged. Lewis roars and screams and dances alongside wacky and abstract rhythms like he's finally home. This is music that refuses categorisation whilst remaining deeply rooted in jazz tradition, music that honours Don Cherry's curiosity whilst forging its own path, music that proves improvisation and focus aren't mutually exclusive.

For anyone following contemporary jazz's most adventurous voices, Apple Cores is essential listening. For those new to Lewis's work, it's an ideal entry point: accessible enough to draw you in, complex enough to reward repeated listening, and powerful enough to make you understand why DownBeat named him a rising star. This joint is hittin'.

Available now at Lush Life Records.