Connecting the dots: James Brandon Lewis wants to turn everything into music

Knowing that tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis has a highly omnivorous mind, let’s get straight to it: What time did he wake up today, and what has he been thinking about since?

“This morning, it was like 3,” says Lewis, wide-awake in a cafe near his Brooklyn apartment on a recent Friday around lunch hour. “But that’s because I went to bed early.” Then, in a voice as soft as wool, he gently unloads the contents of his short-term memory, expounding on John Coltrane’s encounter with God, the mechanics of Gregorian musical notation, lines in art (“Paul Klee said a line is a dot that went for a walk”), lines in science (“If I’m drawing a molecule, the line is the bond”), the imagination of George Washington Carver and the poetry of Aimé Césaire, before quietly stopping himself. “So yeah,” he says, “I spend time trying to connect the dots in the morning.”

In his music, Lewis takes all of those dots for a walk. Over the past decade, the 41-year-old has become one of the more prolific and participatory players in contemporary jazz, having released acclaimed albums with his trio, his quartet and his Red Lily Quintet, in addition to appearing on recent recordings from trumpeter Dave Douglas, guitarist Ava Mendoza, percussionist Ches Smith, jazz-punk hybridists the Messthetics and more. Lewis often describes his collaborative urge as “chasing energy” — but he doesn’t make his listeners chase after him. Instead of zigzagging across his constellation of interests, he tries to channel them all into a single human breath, using his saxophone to generate a tonal richness that feels as sturdy as rebar.

You can hear it throughout his latest album, “Apple Cores,” named after a series of influential magazine columns penned by jazz critic Amiri Baraka in the 1960s, and doubly inspired by the music of Don Cherry, the hyper-inquisitive trumpeter whose idea of free jazz involved communing with the music of the entire planet. Alongside his trio — Chad Taylor on drums and mbira; Josh Werner on bass and guitar — Lewis captured all of “Apple Cores” in two studio sessions, entirely improvised but obviously not summoned from thin air. Even with Cherry and Baraka standing at the front of his brain, Lewis says he’s trying to communicate life’s totality. Hear The James Brandon Lewis Trio perform at 8:30 p.m. Friday, March 7, at Constellation Chicago.

“I’m allowing all these things to come through me,” he says. “It’s merged. So when I pick up my horn, I don’t think about it as a separate thing from reading a book or spending time with my family.”

It requires focus, something that tightened during his graduate studies at California Institute of the Arts, where his instructors included some of jazz music’s broadest thinkers — Charlie Haden, Wadada Leo Smith, Joe LaBarbera and others. Having arrived at CalArts well-versed in standards and gospel music, Lewis says his mindset quickly accelerated from “OK, maybe I want to compose” to “I’m not waiting to speak anymore.” In 2012, he moved to New York, and in 2014, he released the album “Divine Travels,” a declaration of purpose that felt levelheaded and wide open. Lewis remembers critics pinning him down with that paradox.

“I wasn’t out enough,” he says. “I wasn’t in enough.”

So he simply pushed forward, cutting records with determination and speed, making a concerted effort to work with a variety of record labels, making sure his discography kept up with his mind. More than a decade later, he hasn’t broken pace.

“I’ve had things in my family — births, deaths — that force the intensity,” Lewis says. “I’m not creating albums just to create albums. If life isn’t promised, what does that look like? I can’t afford to waste a day.”

That intensity lends itself to breadth. In 2023, Lewis’ Red Lily Quintet released “For Mahalia, With Love,” a plush and gracious tribute to gospel giant Mahalia Jackson. Six months later, Lewis pivoted toward something much steelier with the Messthetics — the D.C. trio featuring guitarist Anthony Pirog and Fugazi rhythm section Brendan Canty and Joe Lally — dropping a hard-driving album on the storied Impulse! Records label and touring tenaciously in support of it. Having clocked nearly 70 shows with the Messthetics last year, Lewis says he’s still savoring the visceral sensation of it all.

“I like the way music is played in a rock or punk venue,” he says. “I like the music loud, and with purpose. We’re about to play, we’re about to sweat. I love that.”

Big decibels, deep purpose. Many of Lewis’ aesthetic choices feel firmly rooted in principle, in discipline. His urgency isn’t distress. His voraciousness doesn’t collapse into distraction. When friends and family check in on him to make sure he isn’t working himself too hard, he says he feels busy but sure-footed — and his playing on “Apple Cores” bears that out. He sounds confident, clear-eyed, cooperative.

“What I’m proud of with ‘Apple Cores’ is that it’s three voices,” Lewis says. “I don’t think about leaders, sidemen. We’re all out here. We’re all just doing this, trying to survive.”

Is that what draws Lewis to Don Cherry? His worldly egalitarianism?

“His level of curiosity,” Lewis says. “That’s why I’m interested.”

He cites the pathfinding grooves on Cherry’s exquisite 1975 album “Brown Rice.” He says he admires the way Cherry’s compositions can conjure “a tide coming in and out,” and how Cherry held on to his stylistic fearlessness in the 1980s, back when hip-hop was only beginning to touch the greater pop psyche.

“The record where he’s rapping? ‘Home Boy [(Sister Out)]’? It takes some serious guts,” Lewis says. “It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, he’s being commercial.’ No, he’s doing what he wants to do. Nobody was forcing Don Cherry to rap.”

While there’s no rhyming on “Apple Cores,” it isn’t hard to suss out raplike shapes in Lewis’ melodic phrasing. Squint your ears at the coupled notes he bleats in the album’s opening moments and you might hear something like “mic check, one-two, one-two.” Deeper in the proceedings, the trio conjure the loping propulsion of go-go music on a track titled “D.C. Got Pocket,” a double entendre referring to Cherry’s pocket trumpet as well as “the pocket,” a collaborative sense of interwoven groove that go-go players consider holy. Lewis got fluent in the latter during his undergraduate semesters at Howard University, but what does the pocket mean to him now? Is it a tightening synchronicity? A bringing of order?

“It’s this elasticity of groove, almost like a balance,” Lewis says. “You remember those trust exercises? I lean back and you catch me? The pocket is that. No matter what’s happening in the music, you can fall into each other and the groove is still going to be there. It’s going to sit right in the deep fold. Like when you get home after a long day, trusting that when your head hits the pillow, that pillow is going to cushion it in just the right way.”

Maybe that’s his 3 a.m. rise and shine talking. Or maybe Lewis really is trying to transpose every last moment of these precious waking hours into music, start to finish.

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James Brandon Lewis Trio

When: 8:30 p.m. Friday, March 7

Where: Constellation Chicago, 3111 N. Western Ave., Chicago

Tickets: $20 at wl.seetickets.us/