When saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin finished the fourth song of her set, “Pursuance: The Music of the Coltranes,” at Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan on Jan. 11, a techie gave her a time warning. The amped-up crowd expressed dismay. “Don’t tempt me,” she quipped into the mic. “Any woman who made a Coltrane album will play all night.”
The notion seemed credible. That evening, the seemingly indefatigable Benjamin played with ferocious joy, keeping time in her silver high-tops, chatting up the audience, even throwing her shiny jacket on the stage in mock surrender during a particularly blistering tenor solo by guest artist Marcus Strickland. In all aspects of her craft, the young alto player seemed to be testing established boundaries as much as she was lionizing the artistry of her musical forebears.
The LPR gig, part of the event-packed 2020 Winter JazzFest, was something of a preview for Benjamin’s latest undertaking, the self-produced album Pursuance: The Coltranes, due out on Ropeadope Records March 27. Several of the prominent players from the album joined Benjamin on the LPR stage: besides Strickland, bassist Reggie Workman, saxophonist Greg Osby, and violinist Regina Carter. These talents represent only a smattering of the musicians who contributed to Pursuance, but with more than 40 artists on the new release, Benjamin would have been hard pressed to fit its entire personnel on the LPR stage, even if the musicians had been available.
“One problem I've always had in life is dreaming really big,” Benjamin said in an interview at a Lincoln Center café, the day before the LPR show. Off stage, with her gleaming gold horn tucked away in its case, Benjamin reveals a different side of her musical persona: the conscientious student of jazz history, smitten with the innovators who first charted the artistic path that she herself now treads, albeit in silver high-tops.
Benjamin doesn’t exaggerate when she talks about dreaming large. To date she’s released two albums under her own name, both with casts of more than 20 musicians—Retox (Motema) in 2012 and Rise Up (Ropeadope) in 2018. With these discs, more funk and soul than jazz, Benjamin first began to develop a feel for band-leading, a skill that separates forward-looking jazz innovators from the merely talented.
“In every [past] generation, you had to be a bandleader, somebody who decided to take the steps to change things,” she said. “If you're playing with people it feels great, but bandleaders have a way harder job.”
Benjamin likely made this observation during her years of experience as a side player to a host of in-demand pop, soul, funk, and jazz acts—Gregory Porter, Missy Elliot, Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys, Clark Terry, Keyshia Cole, The Roots, Macy Gray, Talib Kweli, Anita Baker, and David Murray among them. These gigs started pouring in soon after Benjamin graduated from the jazz program at The New School in her hometown of New York City; they not only inspired Benjamin’s thinking beyond side player work, but yielded several of the relationships that would benefit the new album.
Pursuance is Benjamin’s most ambitious independent project so far, not only for its eye-popping lineup (more about that later) but for the magnitude of its subject matter: the musical import of the first couple of jazz, Alice and John Coltrane. The meaningful twist here is the equal weight that Benjamin gives Alice’s contribution to the Coltrane legacy; she intentionally divided the albums’ 13 tracks nearly equally between the two composers. Alice gets the extra track.
For Benjamin, this balanced approach to the material is only natural: Growing up, her default Coltrane was Alice and not John. In fact, she had fallen for Alice’s other-worldly compositions before she even knew that John existed.
“A friend of mine had turned me on to Alice. She was friends with [Alice’s] family,” Benjamin recalled. “We would play her music all the time, and it really inspired me to start writing and creating. Then, out of the blue, I opened the booklet [to one of Alice’s CDs] and I saw the name John Coltrane. I asked, ‘Who's John Coltrane? Does Alice have a brother?’”
Intrigued, Benjamin dug into John Coltrane’s discography, starting with his earliest work, through to his last. “By the end, I had a full picture of him,” she said. “I'm glad I came at it that way, versus somebody playing ‘Giant Steps’ for me, which maybe I wouldn’t have understood.”
This immersion into the Coltranes’ work at a young age, without any didactic intervention, proved fortuitous for the budding player. “I didn't understand the difference between improvisation, composition, or anything, so whatever I heard, I was assuming that was just an expression of the musician,” Benjamin remembered. “All I heard was the essence of what makes that musician that musician. So when I was trying to transcribe and copy their music, I was trying to copy the actual message and personality. It was just me independently trying to figure it out.”
Benjamin used a similar approach to her recording of the Coltrane material: She felt her way through the process, one brainstorm leading to the next. “The project came in different shapes,” she noted. “I started out just wanting to do a Coltrane project, and I knew I couldn’t do John without Alice. To me, they’re equally important. So, I thought, Great! I can honor them with my band. Then I thought, let me call Reggie.”
Bassist Reggie Workman, who’s known Benjamin since her New School days, is the rare living musician who’s worked with both of the Coltranes, first in John’s quartet in the 1960s and then on Alice’s album Transfiguration Live (Warner Bros.) in 1978. “I thought he could give me some insight since he played with both of them,” Benjamin said.
It was around this time that the National Endowment of the Arts announced that Workman would be a recipient of a 2020 Jazz Master Award. This development set Benjamin to pondering the role that the Coltrane-era musicians had played in her own growth as an artist.
“I was glad that Reggie got some credit, not just the NEA Award, but also tenure at the New School” Benjamin said. “And I was thinking that people of his generation don't get enough props, especially from my generation. We say that we honor these guys, but we don't make a public statement about it in our work.”
‘So, I thought, there are a few guys alive who played with the Coltranes. Maybe [the album] would be a good way for us to pay tribute to all the work they’ve done. To let them know that it’s meant a lot to my generation.”
Besides Workman, Benjamin had her eye on bassist Ron Carter, who’d played on Alice Coltrane’s third album Ptah, the El Daoud (Impulse!), and saxophonist Gary Bartz, who, like Carter, had worked closely with McCoy Tyner, a longtime pianist with The John Coltrane Quartet. She wasn’t sure either would agree to record with her, but she reached out.
“I thought, I'm gonna ask all my dream people for this CD, and whoever says no says no, and whoever says yes says yes,” she said. Carter, Bartz, and Workman all agreed, with Workman signing on as co-producer.
“Then the project started spiraling,” she revealed. She started thinking about all of the other award-worthy musicians whose work had influenced her. Didn’t they deserve props, too? With this question in mind, she thought to invite some of her mentors, like saxophonist Steve Wilson and singer Dee Dee Bridgewater, and fellow rising stars, like trumpeter Keyon Harrold and drummer Marcus Gilmore. Then she started making phone calls to see who would be available for two all-day recording sessions in the dead heat of the New York summer.
These two marathon sessions were “like a reunion,” recalled Brandee Younger, one of the rarest of the rare among musicians—an elite jazz harpist. “Everyone was there, and it was really special.” Long a devotee of Alice Coltrane, who pioneered the jazz harp, Younger first met Benjamin in the late 2000s, around the time both worked for avant-garde drummer Rashied Ali. (Ali, too, had played with both of the Coltranes.)
“Lakecia was absolutely thoughtful in her instrumentation and the selection of the players, all the way from Reggie Workman to the [Rootstock Republic Strings],” said Younger. But what stuck out the most, she added, was that “Lakecia always brings an element of soul to whatever she’s playing. When we recorded ‘Going Home,’ that old classic that Alice did, it was a beautiful, spiritual moment in the studio because of the soul she brought to it.”
Alice released the original “Going Home” on her 1973 album, Lord of Lords (Impulse!), six years after John’s death and two years before she founded the Sai Anantam Ashram in California. By this time in her music career she had begun experimenting with soothing, ethereal orchestrations, writing them herself, hinting at her growing interest in devotional music. Lord of Lords would be her last commercial album for more than two decades.
Alice returned to Impulse! Records in 2004 to release Translinear Light, the album from which Benjamin borrowed the traditional gospel blues tune, “Walk With Me.” In Benjamin’s arrangement, more than a step removed from the Coltrane version, Regina Carter’s free sections act as bookends for Benjamin’s solo work, the mournful stirring of her strings standing in contrast with the jubilant tones of Benjamin’s horn.
Alice didn’t release any new music after this album, though several archival recordings would surface after she passed in 2007. Among them was a rendering of her composition “Om Shanti”—a call for peace— originally released on cassette for the ashram’s followers. Benjamin’s take on “Om Shanti,” a mash-up of spoken word, sung chants, and soaring sax (with singer-songwriters Georgie Anne Muldrow and Meshell Ndegecello) retains all of Alice’s fervor even as it speaks of modern pain. It’s as much a contemporary cri du coeur as an homage.
Benjamin’s use of spoken word—just one of her stylistic allusions to hip hop—on tunes like “Om Shanti” highlights both her comfort and her expertise with popular music idioms outside of jazz. For instance, on “Acknowledgement,” from John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (Impulse!), Benjamin opens with a poetic riff by Abiodun Oyewole, founder of the iconoclastic spoken-word group, The Last Poets:
“John Coltrane was a vessel/Taking us to the house of God/He spoke to God in the language God knew/In the language of sound.” With this intro she uses sound in a way that Coltrane didn’t to honor the way that he did. There’s nothing amiss here: Imitation is not her generation’s way of paying respect.
But in deciding to use spoken word on the album, Benjamin wasn’t making a generational statement as much as an artistic one. “Words can press through sometimes when the music can't,” she observed.
However, aside from the sung prayers and spoken word sections, the album doesn’t contain any text. This was not Benjamin’s first idea, which was to include original lyrics by powerhouse vocalist Bridgewater on “Acknowledgement.” She and Benjamin even recorded the track with these lyrics, before doubling back to re-record it with a vocalese.
“We found out that the estate doesn’t allow any lyrics to Coltrane’s music at all,” explained Bridgewater in a phone conversation from her home in New Orleans.
But no harm, no foul—Bridgewater’s skilled improvisation on the tune only magnified its timeless musicality. And, luckily, Benjamin has some of the best vocal improvisers around on her first-call list: Jazzmeia Horn scatted effortlessly on John Coltrane’s “Central Park West” for the album, and Charenée Wade stepped up to do the same at the LPR concert.
As Benjamin learned, towing the fine line between creative interpretation and copyright violation is just one of the risks that performing artists face in their efforts to honor the masters of their craft. Another is the threat of comparison with those same masters. Workman issued a word of caution, however, about any such comparisons between Benjamin’s work and that of the Coltranes.
“This music is in her blood, and [through the Coltrane material] she’s finding a way to tell a similar story. John Coltrane would be upset if we did his work the same way that he did 65 years ago,” Workman remarked, going on to point out Benjamin’s smarts when it comes to contemporary music. “Her ears are open, and her roots are firmly planted. This album is her way of saying where her roots are. Firmly planted and waiting to grow.”
Like Workman, Bridgewater also sees signs of Benjamin’s tremendous possibilities, not just for artistic growth, but for success in the music industry. “The word for Lakecia is fierce. She’s really, really powerful as a player,” she said. “I think the sky’s the limit for her.”
For the time being, though, whatever successes may lie ahead, Benjamin finds in the work of the Coltranes a template for how she’s like her life to be, both artistically and personally. “I was looking to get closer not just to their music, but to what they meant when they talked about a spiritual life,” she said. “I strive to be in a place where I can be whole within myself, where every note I play is touching somebody on a deeper level. So, the album is called Pursuance because I'm still striving to get to that place. Aesthetically, I'm trying to get to heaven every time I play.”
After she launches Persuance at Jazz at Lincoln Center on March 11-12, Benjamin will spend some of the spring touring Europe and the U.S. But when asked about her upcoming plans, she mentions only one: a meeting with bebop legend Sheila Jordan, who won an NEA Jazz Master Award in 2012, at the age of 84.
“She knew Charlie Parker,” Benjamin said, excitedly. She’s looking forward to hearing all about him from someone who was there. DB
(Reprinted from the April 2020 issue of Downbeat magazine)