Collection: Your Brother's Keeper

Your Brother's Keeper, the collective assembled by drummer and producer Jake Long, who also leads Maisha, draws together Ali MacSween on piano, synthesizers and modular effects, Axel Kaner-Lidstrom on trumpet, Twm Dylan on double bass, Tim Doyle on percussion and Chelsea Carmichael on tenor saxophone, a band built around collective improvisation and deep listening rather than a fixed compositional approach. The Gary Bartz connection came through the Night Dreamer direct-to-disc sessions in Haarlem, where Bartz and Long's previous band Maisha had already recorded, and the musical understanding that developed in those sessions formed the basis for "Where Rivers Meet" (Brownswood, 2026). Bartz, a saxophonist who had played with Miles Davis in the early 1970s and built a subsequent career as one of the central figures in spiritual jazz through his NTU Troop recordings, brought a lineage stretching back through Charles Mingus, Max Roach and Art Blakey into a session that had no interest in nostalgia.