Music Monday: Some New and Some Old Saxophone

This week has been exhausting for various reasons including biting off more than we can chew this season at Polis and too many lingering obligations on the home front to allow much downtime on my summer research leave.

That said, I got up early on Sunday morning to take care of a few letters of recommendation and enjoy James Brandon Lewis’s new album Abstraction is Deliverance (2025). The album features his quartet, with Aruán Ortiz on piano, Brad Jones on bass, and Chad Taylor on drums. The start of the show is Lewis who is in his full post-Coltrane glory with enough mid-1970s Pharoah Sanders to keep things from completely heading into outer space. It’s great. Check it out: 

Since I’ve been in a saxophone state of mind, I also checked out a bit of Nathan Davis. I didn’t know anything about this guy until last week (and it may be that I found out about him from Lewis on his social media feed!). I really enjoyed Davis’s Sixth Sense in the Eleventh House where Davis works with a quartet and plays both tenor sax and bass clarinet. Beyond that, I don’t know much about him, but I’ve had this album in the rotation this summer.

Finally, I follow Blue Note on Facebook mostly because they remind me of all the classic albums that they produced in the 1950s and 1960s (and continue to re-release regularly). They were shilling their newest heavy-weight vinyl release of some Dexter Gordon albums and that got me listening to Gordon’s 1966 album Gettin’ Around. It’s a fantastic “mid-career” Dexter Gordon performed with a pretty typical mid-1960s Blue Note ensemble supplemented by Bobby Hutcherson on vibes. It features Barry Harris on piano, Bob Cranshaw on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums. 

It’s a nice complement to the more adventurous album recorded in Paris and released the year before, One Flight Up (1965) where Donald Byrd, Kenny Drew, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, and Art Taylor comprise Gordon’s European ensemble. I love the A-side which consists of 18-minutes of Donald Byrd’s “Tanya.”