Together with his Red Lily Quintet featuring Kirk Knuffke on the cornet, Chris Hoffman on cello, William Parker on the double bass and Chad Taylor on drums, the tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis follows his acclaimed tribute to the agricultural scientist George Washington Carver on Jesup Wagon with a cherishing yet transformative take on some of the songs made famous by the gospel icon Mahalia Jackson. A personal outpouring as the music suffused his childhood, Lewis calls For Mahalia, With Love much more than a tribute album, instead describing it as ‘a three-way conversation between Mahalia, my grandmother and me’.
All of the songs rework traditional material and therefore blend familiar themes with stirring passages of free improvisation. That movement or commingling almost inevitably prompts comparisons with Albert Ayler and his penchant for searing spiritualism which riffs on marching band motifs, yet over the nine roiling songs of For Mahalia, With Love the bandleader and his Red Lily Quintet draw just as readily from soul and rhythm and blues and the gnarly roots of rock and roll.
Lewis and Knuffke are by turns burly and sinuous blowers with the bandleader for all of his strapping dynamism capable of great tenderness of tone. Parker and Hoffman take quite different approaches to their string instruments and sound bluesy or almost baroquely ornate while the drummer Taylor is adept at everything under the sun, from post-rock and minimalist stylings to West African rhythms and screeching, blowout free jazz. As an ensemble they can stomp and swing or follow almost imperceptibly a shifting breeze.
Here a standout take on the defining spiritual ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ opens through snatches of melody before an extended improvisation full of languorous yearning and wide rambling reassembles the refrain. ‘Go Down Moses’ and ‘Wade in the Water’ are laden deep while on ‘Calvary’ they erect their own kind of monument. And on the rumbling ‘Elijah Rock’ – a spiritual which shares verses with the civil rights bastion ‘Mary Donāt You Weep’ – the tenor of Lewis and cornet of Knuffke twine around one another carried out by Parker’s bounding bass and Taylor’s percussive swathes, turning chasms into bold edifices and smiting snakes where they lay.
