Braxton Cook

"I feel a lot," says Braxton Cook, the genre-shifting musician. "I'm a deeply emotional person. I just love. You know what I mean? Like, I love my family. I love my people. I love my friends. I love music. I have a belief that things can and will be better." His latest album, Who Are You When No One Is Watching? (out February 24, 2023, Nettwerk Music Group) holds up a mirror to ourselves and the society around us. It's at once confrontational, thoughtful, sentimental. "People need to see themselves, to some degree. Even if I'm speaking about tragedy, there's still that glimmer of hope I infuse in my music." Which is to say, Who Are You When No One Is Watching? is also very much a thing of beauty.

This is expected of Cook. His acumen as a saxophonist is legend and frequently elicits descriptors such as "virtuoso" and "prodigy" (see: The New Yorker, Jazz Times, FADER). He's played with Rihanna, toured with Solange Knowles, performed for Quincy Jones. He is a Juilliard graduate (from an already overachieving family: Mom was a classical pianist, dad a Georgetown professor) and even an Emmy winner (for a John Coltrane mini-doc, produced by Vox). At face value, he is an undisputed jazz wunderkind. But with Who Are You When No One Is Watching? it's clear that Cook — who mingles R&B, soul, funk, hip hop into a foundation of jazz — is also very much a chronicler and shaper of modern culture.

Right out of the gate, Cook makes this clear. “MB (For Ma’Khia Bryant)" is a remembrance of the 16-year-old teen killed in 2021, by police in Columbus, Ohio. "Being in this country that is inherently racist, the role that you play is either looking the other way or sharing these stories," Cook says. He improvised the melody — an intentionally powerful way of capturing his gut reaction to the unfolding news — off of a set of loops from his friend, celebrated English drummer Moses Boyd. Instead of being a dirge, "MB" is even more heartbreaking: a shimmering, carefree fever dream of a young life, otherwise cut short.

Who Are You When No One Is Watching? journeys through hope and love and family — before ending a weightier note. "The Answer," an ethereal-soul take, is also a gut-punch. "Oh, I don’t know why / I can't find the answers / I don’t know why / Time's moving faster / I don’t know why / Are we moving backwards?" he sings. The track, which he wrote on the guitar, looks around us and feels an overwhelming sense of loss and grief. "There's something kind of melancholic about hearing a melody that repeats over and over again," he explains. "It's almost like a prayer."

Cook negotiates the role of art throughout all this. For the sweeping loveliness that is "Black Mona Lisa" (a strings-and-flute laden track, inspired by the Nat King Cole song), he wrote a bass line on the sax that grows into a bridge courtesy of his former Juilliard classmate, guitarist Andrew Renfroe. "At the end of the day, it's a work of art, but I want to remind people it's a Black work of art," he says, having here liberated Black beauty of fetishization or appropriation. Similarly, "’90s" wistfully looks back an era of Black love in entertainment. "On its surface, the song is absolutely nostalgic: the music that I used to listen to, the movies we used to see," he says. "This beautiful kind of love was something I aspired to have one day. And you know, I feel like I do have it. I think I'm living a dream, to be honest. I actually thought about calling the song '’90s Dream,' because the second half is very much a dream-like sequence."

While the album title is a call to action, "Who are you when no one is watching?" is also very much a question Cook asks himself each day. "Everyone, myself included, is carefully curating their image on social media, hiding every blemish, every mistake, every pitfall in order to present this perfect image," he explains. "We lose true connectivity because we are not presenting our authentic selves." The album is an antidote to this, an act of transparency "about myself, my struggles with mental health and self-doubt, as well as issues in my family that I've had to work through."

He devotes a pair of tracks simply to count his blessings. In the sweetly mellifluous "Statistics," the new-ish father time-travels to the future, lovingly looking back on his domestic life. "We beat the statistics / Don’t need analytics," he sings. "Yea we’ll go the distance / With faith and persistence." It's a sentiment echoed in "The Same," a feathery-light romance that seems to carry a torch for the New Jack slow jams. They're both deeply personal tracks, and in many senses, an antidote to the cascading of regrets that is the ballad "Gold," about his parents' crumbling marriage.

In a deeply personal move, Cook adds interludes between the songs that feature frank conversations with his parents. "We talk about family, marriage, love languages, and the things that potentially led to their divorce," he says. "There's no better way to figure out who you are than to delve into where you're from and the people that birthed you and raised you."

While the burden of behavior drives Who Are You When No One Is Watching?, humanity is its underlying theme. Cook finds this endlessly humbling. “’Let go and let God’ is a phrase we grew up saying in the church," he says. Cook even wrote a song, the weightless spiritual "Let Go," with a warm, wafting chorus repeating that exact phrase. "It’s about having faith that god is working things out. That after you’ve done all you can, at some point you must stop stressing and worrying and just know that God will work it out."

"I've had a lot of get off my chest. So much was out of my control during this period of time, out of everyone's control," he says. "My immediate emotional response is to let go of expectations, dream of a time or what could be." In the end, Who Are You When No One Is Watching? is both contemplation and self-actualization, an ambitious attempt at answering the question its title poses.