At end of an uninterrupted two-hour set, James Brandon Lewis directs a weary hand-signal towards the venue’s sound crew and, moments later, receives a microphone. Loud applause subsides, the audience eager to hear the saxophonist’s first spoken words of the night after an electrifying performance. “Please support live music,” Lewis says. “Don’t let the robots win.”
It’s hard to imagine any machine besting the band’s vibrant, vigorous output on 24 October. As part of the Enjoy Jazz festival, Lewis played alongside pianist Aruán Ortiz, bassist Brad Jones and drummer Chad Taylor. It’s a familiar formation that appears on several of the reedist’s records, including his 2025 release Abstraction Is Deliverance (Intakt).
Many of Lewis’s albums are captured via handful of intense sessions. This show in Heidelberg, one hour south of Frankfurt, involved a similarly fervent mood. Lewis’s behemothic voice flooded the 700-seat hall. Truly, he holds jazz history in his horn: the viscous low tones of Pharoah Sanders, the punchy repeated notes of Sonny Rollins, the swirling spiritual phrasing of John Coltrane and the upward-tugging high-range vibrato of Ornette Coleman.
There was generosity in this music, too. Some tunes ran for almost 20 minutes with long introductory sections, sprawling solos and slow-ripening rhythms. The group delivered hectic and hair-raising passages but let those segments develop and dissolve at their own pace.
That gave the audience a chance to bathe deeply in the sonic stream. However, frequent twists and variations kept the crowd awake – here a lullabyish line, there an Afro-Cuban excursion, now a marching beat reverberating around the former indoor horse-riding hall. Lewis and his bandmates slid from one idea to the next with deftness and imagination.
When the instruments fell silent, clapping hands filled the void until a shy stagehand pressed a microphone into the sweat-softened flesh of Lewis’s hand. Breathing heavily, he encouraged the upstanding crowd to rise against the tyranny of soulless silicon chips and kleptomaniacal algorithms. But he needn’t worry. On tonight’s evidence, the poor robots don’t stand a chance.
James Brandon Lewis Quartet at Karlstorbahnhof, Heidelberg, 24 October 2025
