As far as meetings between punk elder statesmen and avant-jazz explorers go, the Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis is an intuitive one. Drummer Brendan Canty and bassist Joe Lally, as the rhythm section of Fugazi, had a wide appetite for grooves from outside of hardcore’s pummeling standard vocabulary, whether the half-time sway of reggae or the piston-pumping backbeat of funk. And Lewis, though deeply rooted in jazz tradition, is similarly willing to stray from genre orthodoxy in search of a sound that suits him: The saxophonist’s modern-classic 2016 LP No Filter, full of distorted electric bass and throaty horn lines, has the gleefully pugilistic energy of an all-ages basement show. Lally and Canty formed the Messthetics as an instrumental trio in 2018, filling out the lineup with Anthony Pirog, a left-field jazz guitarist who’s equally adept with sidewinding melody and searing noise, and has worked often with Lewis, including on No Filter. After Lewis sat in with them on a couple of live dates, it must have felt only natural to invite him into the fold for an album.
The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, which the four men composed collaboratively, sits comfortably apart from any prevailing trends in 2020s jazz: no new-agey ambient soundscapes, cerebral free improvisation, nor incense-and-hand-bells spiritual-jazz revivalism. Its sensibility has a whiff of downtown New York in the freewheeling 1980s and early ’90s, when John Zorn was playing grindcore in Naked City and Sonny Sharrock shared a bassist with Henry Rollins. As in that era of cross-pollination, the players meet each other confidently and generously on their own terms. The punks don’t sound eager to prove their jazz bona fides, and the jazzers don’t seem to view punk with any condescension toward its rudimentary building blocks. Each one brings his particular skill set, and the others figure out how to work with it. The results can be astonishing, as in the climactic final section of “Three Sisters,” when Lewis and Pirog play intertwining solos and the Fugazi guys churn beneath them, each player urging the others toward ever higher flights of intensity and invention.
There are also moments that sound more or less like Fugazi with a free-jazz saxophonist instead of a singer. Though they may lack the grand scale of a composition like “Three Sisters,” they ground the album in a sense of boisterous good fun. “Emergence” should be particularly easy for fans of Canty and Lally’s old band to love, with the Messthetics making breakneck switches between “Waiting Room”-style syncopation and pogo-ing power chords, and Lewis blowing like hell on top. Even in his more overtly jazzy work, the saxophonist tends to favor relatively static harmonies over the elaborate chord changes of bebop, an approach that proves a good fit for the lean-and-mean compositional sensibility of a couple of guys schooled on hardcore. With the rest of the band providing such a solid and stripped-down framework, Lewis is free to embellish the melody of “Emergence” in whatever direction he chooses: first straight and declarative, then with increasingly frenetic dissonance as the song goes on.
On a high-profile collaboration like this one, the players could have easily just vamped on a few different grooves with the tape running and called it a day. They’re good enough that even no-stakes jamming would have yielded some compelling moments, and they have enough collective clout that people would have listened either way. To their great credit, they didn’t skimp on actually composing. From the sideways funk riffs of “That Thang” to the bluesy refrain of “Railroad Tracks Home,” each tune is robust enough to stick with you, all providing meaningful context and structure for the improvised journeys they frame. The most ambitious of them is “Boatly,” which spends its first half as a sultry ballad and its second as a soaring post-rock anthem. If a group without this quartet’s easy chemistry and clear mutual respect attempted such a drastic change, it might come out hokey or unpleasantly abrupt: the clear point at which one member’s ideas fade to the background and another’s take over. But as the Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis shift into their finale—Canty stops caressing the drums and begins to pound, Lewis brings his sax from a purr to a scream—you get the sense that these four would only reach this particular conclusion together.
