Music Monday: Ben Webster and Jack Brandfield.

Just a short post this morning! I stumbled upon this wonderful new album by a young tenor saxophonist named Jack Brandfield last week. It’s called I’ll Never Be the Same, and it’s been in heavy rotation in the Caraher house for the last few days.

The album is an unapologetic throw back to the days when jazz was popular music. Brandfield plays with easy pop sensibilities without encroaching on “smooth jazz” or “adult contemporary” categories. His breathy and slurred tone is gorgeous and appropriate for such Jerome Kern classics as “Nobody Else But Me” and the perennial favorite (and likely the strongest track on the album) “Over the Rainbow.” When he does play some of his own compositions they share the same style and approach. 

Not a few commentators have been wowed by this album and noted Brandfield’s similarities in tone and approach to the great Ben Webster. I haven’t listen so much to Webster lately and probably prefer his younger contemporaries who embraced bebop with greater enthusiasm and fluency (especially Sonny Rollins, Hank Mobley, and Dexter Gordon). But after listening to a few albums worth of Ben Webster’s classic late-1950s ensembles (usually anchored by Oscar Peterson and Ray Brown: Soulville and Ben Webster Meets Oscar Peterson), I was completely enchanted by his tone and style.

It also got me thinking about how a guy like Brandfield can use a style of playing can evoke a different time with different attitudes, spaces, and rhythms. I recognize, of course, that the ubiquitous Marsalis brothers have been working to make “traditional jazz” popular for the last 20+ years, to the periodic consternation of fans who want to see jazz and improvisational music as capable of contemporary statements and ongoing innovation. Perhaps Brandfield is working in a similar way, but the intimacy of his playing (and the subtlety of gestures toward post-Coltrane style) seemed to bridge the gap between past and present in way that parallels the best work of historical fiction or even sophisticated historians. The best of this genre does more than narrate a good story or leverage nostalgia, but works to conjure the empathy at the core of our shared humanity.

Maybe claiming that Brandfield stimulates an awareness of our shared humanity is a bit too far for the inaugural record of a 20something tenor sax player, but it does make me think a bit about how music can work in transhistorical modes especially in the deliberate hands of a skilled artists.