Jaimie Branch

Jaimie Branch, born in 1983, was one of the most talented and acclaimed American jazz musicians of the new millennium. Her work helped transform free jazz into a modern format for improvisation, thanks to the grafting of hip-hop-latin-punk-rock contaminations, the result of wide-ranging listening habits and a multitude of collaborations honed over the years between Brooklyn, Chicago and Baltimore.

She chose the trumpet as her instrument of choice, but after her solo debut "Fly Or Die", released in 2017 on International Anthem, the turning point in Branch's path, the move that earned her even greater authority, was adding lyrics to her compositions, delivering them herself, making her message even more direct and effective, and giving it a force that other colleagues simply couldn't match.

Through her lyrics her work took on a strongly political edge, openly "against": in this context, a track like "Prayer For Amerikkka", featured on her second album "Fly Or Die II: Bird Dogs Of Paradise" (2019), inevitably takes on absolute centrality within the project: an anti-Trump invective built on a rock-solid blues foundation, ready to evolve into a wild mariachi dance, evoking both the tradition of work songs from the slavery era and the current issues at the Mexican border.

But within a work like "Fly Or Die II" no dividing walls ever emerge; instead, there's a great multiethnic, multi-stylistic embrace: from the tropicalist sound of "Simple Silver Surfer" to the ancestral echoes found in the percussive afro evolutions of "Bird Of Paradise", a perfect prelude to the vividly colorful explosion of the latin-tinged "Nuevo roquero esteréo". Toward the end we encounter the Zappa-esque delirium of "Twenty-Threee n Me, Jupiter Redux", which spills over into a wild free form improvisation, and the seductive closing ballad "Love Song", bolstered by a surge that reinvigorates a composition of the highest class.

Thanks to the two "Fly Or Die" albums, Jaimie became one of the most acclaimed revelations of a decade crucial to the overall reassessment of jazz music – more or less contaminated, more or less avant-garde – and to its definitive embrace by younger generations and by the circuits that typically host the indie scene. Kamasi Washington and Shabaka Hutchings represent just the tip of the iceberg of a scene that hasn't been this vital in years.

In 2021 Jaimie Branch brought full circle everything she had released under her own name up to that point by putting out "Fly Or Die Live", the complete recording of a show held at Moods in Zurich, Switzerland, on January 23, 2020, just before the pandemic exploded.

Among the many collaborations realized over the years, at least one must mention the Anteloper project, shared with Jason Nazary, which yielded three albums, including the excellent third one, "Pink Dolphins", released just weeks before her untimely death, which occurred suddenly on August 22, 2022, at only 39 years old, due to an accidental overdose. As her testament, Jaimie leaves us a handful of modern "protest songs" that, bolstered by a prodigious talent, marked a new golden age for international jazz music.

Exactly one year after her passing, "Fly Or Die Fly Or Die Fly Or Die ((world war))" represents her final legacy. Recorded in the summer of 2022 with the support of her faithful Fly Or Die quartet, it was completed taking into account Jaimie's wishes, gathered from impressions she confided to friends and collaborators during the recording sessions. "world war" is an album full of joyful moments, bursting with life, like all her previous works, a less "against" project: the political edge remains, but this time it's captured more subtly. Alongside the militant commitment, Branch this time shows a certain "quest for accessibility", thus setting herself apart from the less approachable traits of, for example, a Moor Mother. And she does so through enlightened songwriting, capable of wielding jazz music with a "punk" attitude, contaminating it with latin, funk, rock, hip-hop and afrobeat rhythms. Just listen to one of the central tracks on "world war", the propulsive "Take Over The World", to understand how no one in the world in the 2020s was able to play jazz with her same vision, with her same attitude. Alongside these "violent" outbursts, she also proves she can handle the blues with tenderness, respect and personality, as happens on "The Mountain", a stripped-down, minimalist reworking of the Meat Puppets' "Comin' Down", shared in solitude with Jason Ajemian's double bass. "Borealis Dancing" and "Bolinko Bass" are instead invaluable showcases of skill set over Afrocentric rhythms, and the "tribal" imprint grows even stronger on "Burning Grey", enriched by the gripping vocal performance of a trumpeter who proves increasingly credible in the role of singer as well.

Within the span of a career that was far too short, between protest songs and wild free-form improvisations, Jaimie Branch had the strength to make us imagine a "different" world, one in constant evolution, a prodigious talent who made substantial contributions to the excellent state of health of the contemporary jazz scene, more or less avant-garde, helping it gain acceptance with an "other" audience. It's impossible not to think of "world war" as the most important and significant jazz album of 2023, and certainly not as some token posthumous recognition, but rather as a genuine acknowledgment of excellence for that multiethnic, multi-stylistic embrace aimed at tearing down any dividing wall, which Jaimie Branch was able to conceive and bring to life.

(Claudio Lancia)