Years before James Brandon Lewis gained recognition as one of jazz’s most potent and expressive tenor saxophonists there was a moment he thought he’d found his calling in church.
After earning a degree in jazz studies from Howard University in 2006 Lewis moved out to Colorado, where he found gainful employment on the gospel music scene. The work provided spiritual fulfillment, but he felt stifled creatively and came to realize he was still enmeshed in the worldly realities music business.
“I was in it because of my relationship with God, and the only reason why I didn’t pursue that path is I didn’t see a lot of creative freedom,” said Lewis, 41, who performs with The Messthetics Sept. 9 at the Felton Music Hall and Sept. 10 at San Francisco’s Rickshaw Stop.
“I was only playing hymns and I loved it. But at the same time the gospel music industry is different than Sunday morning service. It’s an industry like any other.”
Looking to spread his wings, Lewis enrolled in a graduate program at Cal Arts in Valencia, where he found venturesome improvisers Charlie Haden and Wadada Leo Smith. Displaying a gift for connecting with veteran masters, he soaked up information and jazz lore as new vistas opened up for exploration.
“Spending time with Wadada, he’d talk about playing systematic music and how he approached composition,” Lewis recalled. “I realized we can know the standards but we can push the limits. There were all of these amazing stories I couldn’t get anywhere else, like talking to Charlie about the first time he met Ornette Coleman,” the blues-steeped alto saxophonist and composer whose rhythmic and harmonic concepts greatly expanded the language of jazz in the late 1950s.
Like a snowball gathering mass as it rolls downhill, Lewis has continued to absorb new information and experiences while his sound maintains a sanctified core. Following up on his George Washington Carver-inspired album “Jesup Wagon,” which was named best album of the year in a leading 2021 jazz critics poll, Lewis and his Red Lily Quintet delivered 2023’s extraordinary two-disc “For Mahalia, With Love,” a glorious celebration of gospel vocal legend Mahalia Jackson.
Music critics are hardly the only close listeners who’ve taken note of Lewis’s music. Sonny Rollins, the 93-year-old tenor sax titan whose shadow is no less imposing a decade after retiring from performance, has hailed Lewis’s creative prowess in spiritual terms.
“When I listen to you, I listen to Buddha, I listen to Confucius,” Rollins said. “I listen to the deeper meaning of life. You are keeping the world in balance.”
Though he’s been in regular touch with Rollins, the benediction was “totally unexpected,” Lewis said. But he’s actively sought out vaunted artists known for building expansive musical realms, like bassist/composer William Parker, who anchors Lewis’ Red Lily Quintet.
Lewis returns to the Bay Area not as a bandleader but as a catalytic agent in The Messthetics, the Washington, D.C., trio formed by bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty, the rhythm section tandem that powered the storied punk band Fugazi, and guitarist Anthony Pirog.
Lewis and Pirog, an uncategorizable player who often works in settings where jazz, rock and new music converge, first connected about a decade ago on a New York gig led by drummer William Hooker. They immediately struck up a friendship. Pirog toured with Lewis’ band in Europe, “and always made me feel like whatever I felt like contributing was the best thing,” Pirog said.
Lewis featured The Messthetics on his first single when he signed to the label ANTI-, the searing 2022 track “Fear Not,” and when he sat in with the trio the following year at the Winter Jazzfest in New York City “he matched the band energetically in a perfect way,” Pirog said.
The collaboration fully blossomed with the March release of the album “The Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis” on Impulse!, a label inextricably linked to musical exploration. Expanded to a quartet, the group is all over the map, from the crunching funk of “That Thing” to the sublime lyricism of “Boatly.”
“The blend of guitar and saxophone is something I’ve always enjoyed, going back to Sonny Rollins and Jim Hall,” Pirog said. “It’s a big thing in surf music, too.”
Lewis collaborates with another singular guitarist at the SFJAZZ Center Sept. 22 as a special guest celebrating the 70th birthday of Marc Ribot, who’s best known as a palette-expanding muse for artists like John Zorn, Tom Waits and Elvis Costello.
“I’m saying something that everyone at this point knows,” Ribot said. “James is one of the great saxophonists, if not the great tenor player of our time.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
JAMES BRANDON LEWIS
With the Messthetics: 8 p.m. Sept. 9 at Felton Music Hall, Felton; $22-$37; www.feltonmusichall.com; 8 p.m. Sept. 10 at the Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco; $20; rickshawstop.com
Marc Ribot’s 70th birthday celebration: 7 p.m. Sept. 22; SFJAZZ Center; San Francisco; $25-$95; www.sfjazz.or
