Fly Or Die Live (International Anthem Records)
Jaimie Branch
Released May 21, 2021
Jazzwise Top 20 Releases of 2021
YouTube:
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Spotify:
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About:
There is a
moment near the top of jaimie branch’s FLY or DIE LIVE, the new album recorded
by the trumpeter’s quartet in Zurich, Switzerland on January 23rd, 2020, which
feels like it bears the weight of both that specific pocket of time, and a
prophecy for all that was soon to come. branch and her Fly or Die crew —
cellist Lester St. Louis, double bassist Jason Ajemian, and
drummer/percussionist/mbira player Chad Taylor — had just kicked off the
concert at Moods, with the opening tracks off their then-new studio album FLY
or DIE II: Bird Dogs of Paradise, the second of which, “Prayer for Amerikkka”
is among the best political songs written during the Tr*mp Era, and when the
moment in question pops off.
The multi-part “Prayer” begins as a goth-blues stomp, its moaning ghosts flying
around the room. A week into a European tour and after three months of constant
live performance, Fly or Die is at home in this new song’s contours, messing
with its internal machinery while guiding its meaning. By now, “Prayer” had
gained a tough spoken-word intro, bringing the context as it slowly gearshifts
the intensity: “It’s a song about America,” off-the-cuffs branch while the
band seethes behind her, “but it’s about a whole lotta places — ‘cause it’s not
just America where shit’s fucked up…” Then arrives the climax, at once
site-specific and far-reaching: “…and it’s not always time to be neutral, do
you know what I mean?” The gathered Swiss crowd knows, understands, and
responds vocally, as Taylor’s backbeats cue branch to bring the trumpet to her
lips, and let out a high-pitched wail. Her horn doesn’t know what’s about to
happen to our world, and yet, somehow, it does — with only the catastrophic
details needing to be worked out. For the next 12 minutes, “Prayer” careens
through its twists of wide-eyed racism and family separation, Ajemian and
Taylor driving branch’s punk-jazz Morricone horn line. “This is a warning, honey…”
cries the song, and over the ensuing 70 minutes, the band echoes its sentiment,
filled with glee and terror.
Where were you in January of 2020, those last moments of the Before Times?
Where was your mind, your body, your soul? Did you have plans, hopes and
aspirations for the oncoming calendar trip around the sun just starting its
initial turn? Were you embroiled in the turmoil continuing to roil the feeds
and the headlines, or steeling yourself for the ones that we all knew were
incoming during an especially contentious American election year? Maybe both.
Or maybe you felt there was some hope blowing in the air.
“There was so much promise for the year,” remembers branch. A world of
possibilities was certainly pending for Fly or Die leading into 2020 and that
Zurich gig. The group was in their favored environment, the stage, where their
individual relationships had been molded. branch and Ajemian had been playing
together since the mid-’00s in Chicago, and admiring Taylor’s work with the
Chicago Underground and at the city’s legendary Velvet Lounge jam-session for
just as long. When Fly or Die made its debut at Brooklyn’s Manhattan Inn in
2016, they made up three-quarters of the band. branch and St. Louis met in 2015
after jaimie first moved to New York, while St. Louis was working at the
Spectrum club where branch played on occasion. (Soon St. Louis replaced
original Fly or Die cellist Tomeka Reid, who departed the band to concentrate
on her own myriad of commitments.) In the years since, this quartet had grown
into a powerful unit, adept at conjuring musical environments that could be
forceful and rhythmic one moment, and fragile the next.
“So much of what the band is about is the trust between the players and the
rapport on stage,” says branch. “The trust means no one’s going to drop the
ball. The band is all improvisers, that’s a really key thing. (A lot of people
improvise, but not everybody’s an improviser.) And I feel like this band
especially is made up of them. So much of the music is led with the ears
first.”
On Fly or Die’s sophomore album Bird Dogs of Paradise, which dropped in October
2019, branch had composed and recorded a batch of songs that showcased a
political perspective and cutting sense of humor, balancing experimentalism and
accessibility, party and erudition, “jazz” and the next thing. They were now
headed out on the road to show off these songs — “the most touring this band
would have ever done,” according to branch — integrating them in suite-like
fashion with music from branch’s critically acclaimed 2017 debut. High on the
work they were presenting, ready to lock into, and have some fun with it.
The late fall saw a month-long tour of Europe; December featured record release
shows in LA, Brooklyn and Chicago; then in January, it was back to the EU for a
two-week (no days off) sprint, of which the Thursday night at Zurich fell
almost directly in the middle. The night before, January 22nd, at Oslo’s
Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene was an upbeat one — St. Louis’ partner had
surprised him by flying in from the States; and branch, who earlier thought
she’d lost a bag with her passport, documents and cash, had it returned by
their van driver after the gig. (No reason for anyone to notice that the
Coronavirus had made its debut on the front-page of the New York Times that
day.) The positive energy carried over to Switzerland. Soundcheck at Moods, “a
big, nice theater in the middle of Zurich,” went well. branch had to talk the
venue into the band doing one long set instead of two, but she also agreed to
them making a multi-track recording of the set. “The vibe in the band was
pretty high,” says branch.
From the offset, it sounds like that’s the case on both sides of the stage. The
calm before the “Prayer” storm finds Taylor’s mbira and branch’s muted horn in
a gentle duet, interweaving textures and melodies. The storm’s aftermath,
“Lesterlude,” is a St. Louis-bowed solo feature turn, moving the strings
towards the noise. Each individual song connects to the next, performed in a
continuous, no-stop style, a part of the group’s DNA on record as well as
stage. By “Twenty-Three N Me,” they are beginning to stretch into free spaces,
and the crowd’s timely enunciations betray the fact that the audience too is up
on every note. “Whales,” an Ajemian-led interlude, brings the sound palette to
the bottom of the ocean, before Taylor’s intricate, rim-heavy beat returns us
to the surface and gets the debut album’s “Theme 001” rolling into a full-on
dance number. Approving screams pile up. The quiet-loud/fast-slow alteration
continues: Taylor solos softly (“Meanwhile”), before exploding alongside
Ajemian to push branch on a supple, double-time swing (“Theme 002,” with branch
in Cootie Williams mode). Later Ajemian’s bass is joined by Taylor’s
thumb-piano and St. Louis’ arco, before going on a solo stroll, upping the
tempo and ending in the funky second-line swagger of “Simple Silver Surfer”
(with great melodic counterpoint by St. Louis). It’s crisp and fun, the
laughter in the audience answered on-stage. By the forever set-ending,
self-indicting new-bar-standard, “Love Song (For Assholes and Clowns),” branch
is conducting the sing-along. Then, soon, it is over.
So, how was it? At the time, Moods was just another stop on a never-ending
tour. Italy next, we gotta go. The following month and a half was a blur too,
amidst the increasingly dire headlines: the February Pacific Northwest dates
found Fly or Die slaying PDX Jazz, but “we keep hearing whispers of this COVID
stuff,” and less than 10 days after playing in Seattle, the city finds itself
as the first American virus hotspot. In early March, before a gig at DC’s
Kennedy Center, there’s a cancellation or two (“a little bit of gloom”). The
following night at Brooklyn’s Roulette — the last gig many in attendance would
see before quarantine — the bottom drops out (“six cancellations in an hour”).
The tour ends, and everything stops. Forever — or what increasingly feels like
it. Though a tape arrived from Zurich in early May, branch didn’t actually
listen to it until the Fall. “I didn’t want to be disappointed,” she says. Such
was the headspace.
“I didn’t have a memory of the show being an amazing show,” branch says. “But
sometimes when you have zero memory of it being good or bad, those are the best
shows. Because when you’re in the zone, in those moments of channeling
creativity, there isn’t time for judgment. So oftentimes a memory is not
created around that judgment, and that’s actually a good indication.” When
branch did pop the tape in, she was unequivocal: “I think this is like the best
that we’ve ever played.”
Branch’s personal highlight of FLY or DIE LIVE also comes on “Prayer,” and it
too speaks of something greater than what you’ll hear on the recordings, or
that the audience at Moods is likely to have picked up on: “There’s a moment in
Part Two of the song when Jason flips the bassline and there’s this moment of
weirdness, but nobody even stops—this is what I’m talking about with trust. So
I just added half a bar more of a vocal, because I heard Jason got wonky. And then
Chad added a [verbalizes a fill]. It’s my favorite part of the whole record
because I hear the mistake and I hear us bulldoze through it, turn the mistake
into a dance — because that’s really what it is at the core of all of this,
music as dance.” No neutrality there either.
Piotr Orlov
Track Listing:
Disc 1
1. Birds of Paradise 06:06
2. Prayer for Amerikkka, Pts. 1 & 2 14:14
3. Lesterlude 02:43
4. Twenty-three n Me, Jupiter Redux 03:16
5. Reflections on a Broken Sea 02:14
6. Whales 01:00
7. Theme 001 04:41
8. …Meanwhile 01:56
9. Theme 002 04:16
10. Sun Tines 01:46
Disc 2
1. Leaves of Glass, Pt. 2 06:31
2. The Storm 02:52
3. Waltzer 05:54
4. Slip Tider 02:41
5. Simple Silver Surfer 04:49
6. Bird Dogs of Paradise 03:12
7. Nuevo Roquero Estéreo 07:58
8. Love Song 07:35
9. Theme Nothing 06:57
Personnel:
Jaimie Branch: trumpet, vocals, vibraslap
Lester St. Louis: cello, vocals, tiny cymbal
Jason Ajemian: bass, vocals, egg shakers
Chad Taylor: drums, vocals, mbira
Recorded live January 23, 2020, at Moods,
Zurich, Switzerland
Engineered by Thierry Looser
Mixed by Dave Vettraino
Mastered by David Allen
Cover Photo by Jaimie Branch
Gatefold Collage by Jaimie Branch
Center Sticker Portraits by Abdesslam MIRDASS
Layout & Insert Design by Craig Hansen
Review:
One of jazz’s most intriguing young(er) talents, New York trumpeter Branch has already released two splendid, politically-charged albums – Fly or Die and Bird Dogs Of Paradise: Fly or Die II – on International Anthem, as well as collaborating with a diverse array of jazz and rock/alternative musicians. But it is as a live performer that she comes into her own. A powerful and charismatic force of nature, I saw her in London in 2018 and 2019, and both those gigs were among the highlights of my jazz year.
So it’s heartening to see that Branch and her brilliant band’s live lightning has been bottled on an in-conert album. Taped just prior to the pandemic in Zurich, it features material from the first FoD album, as well as its recently-released follow-up. By the time of the recording, Branch and her band had reached that perfect point when the material had been honed to near-perfection but had not yet become overly familiar; and even better, this isn’t just a presentation or recreation of two albums in a different (non-studio) environment, it’s an organic dialogue with them – so new ideas bubble up spontaneously and the band run with them.
Branch herself is as impressive as you’d expect, all fiery blowing and lightning-sharp horn stabs, but the rest of the band are just as good. Drummer Taylor lays down some mighty grooves, but also engages in inspirational interplay with whoever is soloing. His meshing with cellist St. Louis and bassist Ajemian is just thrilling.
The Swiss are supposedly a sober people, but this record smashes that stereotype – the Zurich audience whoop and cheer, not just for the music, but also for Branch’s onstage pronouncements on fascism, racism, apathy, and a certain (now departed) White House occupant during the epic ‘Prayer for Amerikkka’. Who says politics and music can’t mix?
Kevin Whitlock (Jazzwise)