When an artist dies young, it often feels as though their passing is especially hard to bear. “So full of life,” is a phrase we reach for. However rote, that sentiment is pretty much unavoidable when you hear the surging, posthumous album by trumpetist, band leader and arch-collaborator Jaimie Branch, who died this time last year aged 39. Branch had very nearly finished this third outing under her own name with her Fly Or Die quartet: percussionist Chad Taylor, acoustic bassist Jason Ajemian and cellist-flautist-keyboard player Lester St Louis. Two groundbreaking, energetic studio albums precede it: 2017’s Fly Or Die and 2019’s Fly Or Die II – Bird Dogs of Paradise.
As the band name suggests, there was a breakneck, YOLO verve to everything Branch did that goes double here. Wolf-like howls punctuate these tracks, vying for primacy with scything, bowed strings. Rhythms drive, tumble and sashay. In the liner notes, her band speak of “longer forms, more modulations and more noise”.
Branch was first and foremost a jazz trumpeter, trained at the New England Conservatory and boasting the nickname “Breezy”. On this record, she is often in league with trombone, flute and clarinet. But her Bandcamp bio memorably identifies her as “a psychedelic warrior for peace, making music into the void”.
A punk disposition suffuses many of these nine tracks, immolating assumptions around the j-word. Fly Or Die III (for brevity) rocks, rolls and generally throws itself around. Branch plays her trumpet as though leading her band into battle – or, Pied Piper-like, to the afterparty in New Orleans. Often taking the instrument from her lips, she shouts and exhorts, whoops and sings.
A DIY operator at heart, she did all her own artwork. So it’s not really that much of a surprise to find that, in the middle of an ensemble album where marimbas trade off with mbiras (a Zimbabwean thumb piano), there’s an unexpected cover of a Meat Puppets song, The Mountain. The country-punk original (Comin’ Down, released 1994) is transmuted into rootsy Americana by Ajemian’s voice and bowed bass; Branch is on trumpet and backing vocals. Elsewhere, the menu is global: snaking, Ethiopian horn tones trade off with tracks that hint at Branch’s Colombian roots on her mother’s side. Branch is also credited as playing a Happy Apple, a Fisher-Price toy from the 1970s.
Regrettably, Branch was no household name. She was born in Long Island, raised in Chicago and was based in Brooklyn; in later life, she booked venues, worked in record shops, organised jams and cross-pollinated with all sorts of artists, from our own Alabaster DePlume, to TV on the Radio, Talib Kweli and Madlib. Operating in a niche space – where jazz meets everything – and recording for a small label (forward-thinking Chicago imprint International Anthem) she never attained the widescreen recognition of star players such as LA’s Kamasi Washington or London’s Shabaka Hutchings. But Branch shared a front-facing sound and a committed, progressive worldview with the two soloists.
You can hear this engagement on tracks such as Take Over the World, a workout full of urgent vigour, ululations and manipulated sound. Just as compelling is the nine-minute-plus tour de force Burning Grey: there are more yips and yowls, with Branch’s trumpet tearing at the air in a kind of jubilant defiance. “Everything feels broken, crippling or token, you wonder why the world slips away, burning grey,” Branch sings, “Believe me, the future lives inside us, don’t forget to fight, don’t forget the fight, don’t forget, don’t forget!”
It’s a terrible waste that Branch’s death is the prism through which we now view her vivid protest rave-jazz, played with a brio that sweeps you along and invites you in. Branch had, according to her old Bandcamp biography, “a deep belief that music changes the world on a cellular level”. That bio was self-penned. “Despite her shortcomings,” it goes on, “this puts Branch on the side of beauty.” No arguments there.
• This article was amended on 20 August 2023 to remove a biographical detail reported elsewhere that was inaccurate.
