Brandon Ross

Guitarist Brandon Ross’s stated aspiration as an instrumentalist is to be a conduit for sound and meaning greater than himself and unmediated by habits of control; he continues to resist the limitations of self-definition. In the words of Adam Shatz, “Ross is a one-man atmosphere factory, availing himself of all the sounds—cries, squeaks, cracks, fuzz, whispers, organ-like echoes—that an electric guitar, in the hands of a master, can produce.” 

After his childhood in New Jersey and a brief stint at Berklee College of Music, Ross followed his older brother to western Massachusetts, where he fell in with Archie Shepp and Marion Brown, both of whom invited him to record and tour with them. By the time Ross moved to New York in the early ’80s, at what was supposedly the end of the “loft jazz” era, he had important mentors on his side and plenty of practice meeting new ones. Soon he bargained his way into a workshop with the violinist Leroy Jenkins and ended up touring with Jenkins’s band STING! and Oliver Lake’s collective Jump Up; soon after, he was playing in Butch Morris’s Conduction configurations. But it was as a member of ensembles led by Henry Threadgill, whom he played alongside in various formations for over a decade, that he achieved a particular richness of craft.

For Ross, an omnivorous listener and avowed opponent of “musical apartheid,” the timing was opportune. Arriving in New York at a moment when the prevailing, constraining aesthetic labels were lifting and had yet to be replaced meant that he could build out an intrepid, entropic education—the bedrock of original artistry. Ross was free to move easily between influences; he was inspired by the sound world of Joni Mitchell and the creative tradition of the AACM; made arrangements of Van Morrison and Robert Johnson for Cassandra Wilson’s breakout crossover album Blue Light ‘til Dawn (Blue Note, 1993), and even performed alongside Jewel on SNL. All of this ultimately led to Ross forming the collective trio Harriet Tubman with bassist Melvin Gibbs (of Defunkt and Rollins Band fame) and drummer JT Lewis (of Don Pullen and David Murray groups). In Harriet Tubman, Ross has fully tapped into the potential unleashed by Miles Davis’s post-Bitches Brew electric ensembles. Together, the trio traverses time and space, melding the heartbeat rhythms of inherited folk musics with the cavernous washes of melody and Ross’s own gnarled, nearly-wrathful shredding on electric guitar. 

Ross’s most recent release is Off The End (Sunnyside, 2024), recorded with his ensemble Phantom Station, which he describes as a crucible for open aesthetic encounter in which composition is assigned as a collective responsibility. In this latest configuration, effervescent electronics lend a wild, marshy ambience. Such openness and wildness are sure to recur in Ross’s solo performance at Blank Forms—an increasingly rare phenomenon for an artist devoted to the insights of ensemble work, seen in his original one-man form for one night only.