Branford Marsalis and Steve Lehman Rethink the Jazz Cover Album

New York Times

25-03-2025

Great jazz composers are legion. But the list of great jazz composers whose work gets played by other artists with any regularity? That's a far more exclusive club.
So when a jazz musician devotes an entire record to the work of a less-celebrated figure, it reads like a deliberate, even courageous, act of advocacy. The soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy did this for Thelonious Monk in 1959, releasing 'Reflections,' the first-ever tribute album to the pianist, which paved the way for a wider engagement with Monk's sui generis songbook; likewise, in the '80s and '90s, the pianist Misha Mengelberg, the trombonist Roswell Rudd and the collective known as the Herbie Nichols Project each made strong cases on record for the work of the once obscure Nichols.
Two new jazz releases find a pair of saxophonists taking similar stands. On 'Belonging,' Branford Marsalis leads his working quartet through a full-album take on Keith Jarrett's 1974 LP of the same name. And on 'The Music of Anthony Braxton,' Steve Lehman and his longtime trio mates, with the guest tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, play a live set heavy on material by Braxton, the unorthodox, genre-transcending visionary who was also Lehman's personal mentor and former collaborator. Both records showcase the potency of the material at hand while achieving a certain kind of expressive liftoff that makes them more than just rote covers.
Jarrett's 'Belonging' places unusual demands on the would-be interpreter. It's an album of emotional extremes that encompasses ecstatic exuberance and prayerful yearning. It also seems almost inextricable from the idiosyncrasies of its maker, revered as an improviser but still undervalued for his prolific writing, which peaked in the '70s with bespoke works for both a stateside quartet and the European one heard on 'Belonging.'
Marsalis has tackled imposing jazz masterworks before, covering the entirety of John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme' in the studio and onstage in the early 2000s, but at its best, his 'Belonging' goes deeper. On the original album, the title track is a brief, reflective interlude, played as a solo-free duet between Jarrett on piano and Jan Garbarek on tenor. Marsalis takes his time with the piece, stating the theme on soprano saxophone and leaving space for the rhythm section — the pianist Joey Calderazzo, the bassist Eric Revis and the drummer Justin Faulkner — to set up a lovely rubato ballad texture. Re-entering, Marsalis starts out playing gentle, aqueous phrases, then steadily crescendoes to a piercing intensity for the final theme statement, the band swelling to match him as his tone grows ever more urgent. It's a performance that both honors and amplifies the somber beauty of the source material.
'The Windup' represents the other pole of 'Belonging.' A rollicking, acrobatically twisty theme, it suggests boogie-woogie gone prog, conjuring a mood of infectious delight. Marsalis's quartet has embraced it as a favorite in recent years, and an earlier version appeared on the band's 2019 live album, 'The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul.' Like in that performance, Faulkner is the driving force on the new studio take. Here he pushes even harder, complementing the opening piano-and-bass vamp with a busily festive beat marked by a barrage of syncopations on snare and cowbell.
Later in the track, the band borrows a quirk of the original Jarrett arrangement, in which piano, bass and drums drop out before the saxophone solo, leaving Garbarek to play an unaccompanied lead-in. Marsalis and company use the moment to veer temporarily into stormy free jazz, a move that only makes their shift back into up-tempo swing for the rest of the leader's solo feel that much more exhilarating. On ''Long as You Know You're Living Yours,' meanwhile, they dig into the strutting backbeat feel of the original — cribbed by Steely Dan for the title track of 'Gaucho' — with similar gusto.
The Marsalis band's readings of the more upbeat 'Belonging' tunes underscore the sense of fun inherent in those pieces, and Lehman and his bandmates likewise tease out the playfulness within Braxton's exacting compositional style. Most of the selections on 'The Music of Anthony Braxton' — recorded in 2023 at the Los Angeles bar ETA and released ahead of its namesake's 80th birthday this June — date from his mid-70s stint on Arista Records, when his highly individual approach, drawing on both the jazz and classical avant-gardes, won enthusiastic support from open-minded critics and dour pans from more myopic ones.
The rendition of '23C,' one of the more striking pieces from Braxton's classic 'New York, Fall 1974' LP, is a standout. On the original, Braxton (on flute), the trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and the bassist Dave Holland align on an ingenious cyclical theme, tacking on one new phrase with each run-through, while the drummer Jerome Cooper adds fluttering texture. Here, though, the drummer Damion Reid joins Lehman, Turner and the bassist Matt Brewer in playing the written material, while stirring in bits of crisp, driving groove, adding a subtle shimmy to Braxton's staccato lines. Later, the band loops the composition's concluding phrase to create a sleek, asymmetrical pattern for the saxophonists to solo over. The overall effect is that of a hip contemporary remix.
On '34A,' a piece found on the excellent, underrated 1982 Braxton effort 'Six Compositions: Quartet,' the band adds a crackling swing feel to the work's central 6/8 loop, finding a loose, jam session-style energy in the composer's raw materials.
Two new Lehman originals stirred into the program reflect his own signature style, tricky yet powerfully kinetic, and show how Braxton's painstaking approach has empowered members of a younger generation (also including other former students such as the guitarist Mary Halvorson and the cornet player Taylor Ho Bynum) to hone their own unconventional aesthetics. And a closing version of Monk's 'Trinkle, Tinkle,' one of the thorniest tunes in the pianist's songbook, frames the whole program as a celebration of inspired eccentricity throughout jazz history.
Much like Lacy's 'Reflections,' both 'The Music of Anthony Braxton' and Marsalis's 'Belonging' argue persuasively that the Braxton and Jarrett songbooks merit not just fresh listening but constructive engagement. Reinvention of older material is a pillar of jazz practice, nourishing the music with the wisdom and challenge of its past. These releases show that if other artists are willing to look beyond the most familiar names, the lessons are out there in abundance.