Jaimie Branch: 7 Steps To Heaven

Following the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, and his subsequent ratification as President-for-Life, the US Constitution was suspended. Jaimie Branch, who had passed in 2022, was one of many musicians, film makers, writers and visual artists whose work, no longer protected by the First Amendment, was declared Un-American and its broadcasting and public performance banned.

Branch had been prominent among those American jazz musicians who raised their voices against the rising tide of neo-fascism during Trump's first term and while he was engineering his return to the White House. With some noble exceptions, the jazz world generally opted out of political engagement, leaving that to rappers and rock musicians. In 2018, with the track "Prayer For Amerikkka" on the sophomore album by her Fly Or Die quartet, Branch began including spoken word in her music, the more clearly to articulate her position. But her very existence was a rebuttal of authoritarianism. Spoken word was just white phosphorous on the cake. Few jazz musicians since Charles Mingus have put their consciences before their careers as fearlessly as did Branch.

After the uprising which in 2031 took down the short-lived presidency of Donald Trump Jr., the seat of the US government returned from Mar-a-Lago to Washington, the Constitution was reinstated, the federal ban on abortion was lifted, the arts flourished and the economy slowly recovered. Branch and her fellow resisters were unbanned. June 17, the date in 1983 when Branch was born, was declared a federal holiday. Jaimie Branch Day is still celebrated each year across the US.

Branch was born in Huntington, New York and moved to Chicago aged 14. She lived for two years in Baltimore, where she studied for a master's degree in jazz performance, before making her final move, to Brooklyn, in 2015. On record, her finest years began in 2017, when she released the first of her four Fly Or Die albums. Branch and the band—Lester St Louis, who succeeded founding cellist Tomeka Reid, bassist Jason Ajemian and drummer Chad Taylor—leaned into free-jazz but simultaneously embraced heavy grooves and rich, often anthemic, precomposed melodies. The music is multi-dimensional and highly charged; it explodes with love and passion and freedom and joy. The video below gives a good idea of where Branch and the band were coming from.

Jaimie Branch: Seven Essential Albums

Since the demise of the Trump dynasty, previously unreleased live recordings by the Fly Or Die quartet have been made available by Branch's label, International Anthem, working in partnership with her estate. More are anticipated.

This article, however, concerns itself with those discs released during Branch's lifetime and immediately following her passing: four Fly Or Die albums and three particularly noteworthy collaborative projects Branch recorded during the same period.

Jaimie Branch
Fly Or Die
International Anthem
2017

Fly Or Die was Branch's first album as leader after ten years of collaborating with and producing other artists. Slow cooking is often best (viz. John Coltrane and Bill Evans). Following her move from Chicago, Branch began a monthly free-jazz series at Brooklyn's Manhattan Inn in January 2016, with a quartet completed by Tomeka Reid, Jason Ajemian and Chad Taylor. "I wanted New York to hear what Chicago sounds like," Branch said later. For Fly Or Die, for which recording began in June, Branch composed a suite of themes which she had distilled from the grooves and melodies improvised at Manhattan Inn. In July, in Chicago, she recorded additional material with a brass-only trio completed by cornetists Ben LaMar Gay and Josh Berman. All this, together with some guitar interludes played by Matt Schneider, Branch then post-produced, overdubbed and edited, weaving together what became Fly Or Die in summer 2017. Simultaneously epic and intimate, it is a spectacular debut.

Jaimie Branch
Fly Or Die II: Bird Dogs Of Paradise
International Anthem
2019

Fly Or Die II: Bird Dogs Of Paradise was mostly recorded in London in late November 2018 (the visit is documented in the YouTube below). The album adds the final pieces to Fly Or Die's aesthetic jigsaw: Lester St Louis replaces Tomeka Reid, Branch adds synths to her palette, and, perhaps even more tellingly, includes two tracks with spoken word. "So much beauty lies in the abstract of instrumental music," she said when the disc was released, "but being this ain't a particularly beautiful time, I've chosen a more literal path. The voice is good for that." Key vocal track is "Prayer For Amerikkka Pt 1 & 2." Excoriating lyrics address institutional racism and the demonisation of incoming migrants, and the groove is as menacing as anything on Miles Davis' Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970). The refrain—"This is a warning/They're coming for you"—widens the lens to include the full spectrum of neo-fascist targets: labor unions, abortion, free speech, an independent judiciary and etc. Bursts of fiery Mexicali trumpet punctuate the track. "Bird Dogs Of Paradise" sounds like a tribute to La Monte Young's Theatre Of Eternal Music band of the 1960s; "Whales"/"Simple Silver Surfer" sets freak-out trumpet alongside lyrical bass and cello solos. Every track is killer.

Dave Gisler Trio with Jaimie Branch
Zurich Concert
Intakt
2020

Branch had a strong profile in European avant-jazz circles from the mid 2010s onwards, and she had particularly close ties with the British and Swiss scenes. International Anthem, her Chicago-based label, has a long established connection with the London underground scene and this led to Fly Or Die II: Bird Dogs Of Paradise being recorded in the city, as noted above. A year later, Branch was invited on a European tour with Swiss guitarist Dave Gisler's trio, and the final performance, at Unerhört!-Festival, was released as Zurich Concert. Gisler is a thrillingly original guitarist, blending traces of John McLaughlin, Jimi Hendrix, Eivind Aarset and James Blood Ulmer into a gutsy but nuanced style that made him an ideal partner for Branch. (Gisler is also heard to advantage on the Samir Böhringer Quartet's Meta Zero, released by the Swiss-based Ezz-thetics label in autumn 2023 and reviewed here.) Branch's Swiss connection endured. She made a second album with Gisler's trio, alongside fellow guest David Murray, and in early 2020 Fly Or Die Live was recorded in Zurich....

Jaimie Branch
Fly Or Die Live
International Anthem
2021

This double album was recorded at a gig in Zurich's Moods club in February 2020. The programme consists mainly of material from Fly Or Die and Fly Or Die II: Bird Dogs Of Paradise with a few new tunes. The big question is: will the music stand as tall as before without the post-production, editing and overdubbing genius which Branch brought to the earlier albums? And the answer is an unequivocal: yes. Branch, not given to hype or bullshit, said she did not remember the show as being particularly outstanding until she played the tapes six months later. "Sometimes when you have zero memory of it being good or bad, those are the best shows," she said. "When you're in the zone, in those moments of channelling creativity, there isn't time for judgement....[But] I think this is like the best that we've ever played." Magic.

!Mofaya!
Like One Long Dream
Trost
2021

Alongside Branch and the Fly Or Die quartet, one of the other noble exceptions to American jazz's political non-engagement in the years preceding Donald Trump's seizure of power was Irreversible Entanglements, another semi-free quartet (which made three albums for International Anthem before moving to Impulse!), which featured the performance poetry of Moor Mother. The band members met in 2015 at a Musicians Against Brutality event after the murder of Akai Gurley, a Black man, by an NYPD officer. Irreversible Entanglements' bassist Luke Stewart is !Mofaya!'s bassist and the lineup is completed by Branch, tenor saxophonist John Dikeman and drummer Aleksandar Skoric. Like One Long Dream was recorded in Amsterdam, Holland in November 2019. The 28-minute opener, "Your Country," is ferociously intense, as is much of the closer, "Wake Up!." The intervening "The Tank," named after the recording location, Roze Tanker (The Pink Tank), is relatively, repeat relatively restrained. Like One Long Dream is a rough diamond to treasure.

Anteloper
Pink Dolphins
International Anthem
2022

Anteloper was Branch and drummer Jason Nazary, who had known each other since the early 2000s but did not record their first album together, Kudu (International Anthem), until 2017. Pink Dolphins, produced and mixed by guitarist Jeff Parker, was the duo's third release. If one had to tag it, "beyond jazz" might suffice. Better would be "aquadelic," as Branch described it. Anteloper's concept was to bring in the moment improvisation into structured forms such as hip hop and drum-machine music. Or to quote Branch again: "This is the shit we want to be playing on big-ass systems. Omnivorous, energy space time, mosh pit dance-music. Get it in the sub-woofers so you can feel it hit, cuz the music has to begin in the body!"

Jaimie Branch
Fly Or Die Fly Or Die Fly Or Die ((World War))
International Anthem
2023

Tragically, the fourth Fly Or Die album was a posthumous release. Branch died from an accidental drug overdose at her home in Brooklyn in August 2022. By then the album, which had been tracked at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha in April 2022, and overdubbed and mixed in Chicago three months later, was near complete, with only tweaks, final titles and artwork to be finalized. In the months following Branch's passing, her family, led by her sister Kate (in whose Brooklyn home studio much of Fly Or Die had been recorded) and the band members got together to complete the record. The result was perhaps the most strikingly beautiful jazz album to be released during 2023. One could talk about St. Louis' amphetamine-urgent high-register viola-like cello passages evoking the Velvet Underground in its John Cale pomp, or the Death In The Afternoon / Mexicali majesty of Branch's open trumpet, or the shades of La Monte Young's opium-addled drone music, and much more... but the best way to feel the spirit of the Fly Or Die quartet is to play the YouTube clip below. In their liner notes, St. Louis, Ajemian and Taylor write: "For this [album], jaimie wanted to play with longer forms, more modulations, more noise, more singing, and as always, grooves and melodies... jaimie wanted this album to be lush, grand and full of life, just as she was." It is indeed all of those things.

Comments