Brandon Ross

Guitarist Brandon Ross’s stated aspiration as an instrumentalist is to be a conduit for sound and meaning bigger than himself and beyond his 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 Marion Brown and Archie Shepp, both of whom invited him to record with them. By the time Ross moved to New York in the fall of 1981, 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!, then Oliver Lake’s collective Jump Up; soon after, he was playing in Butch Morris’s Conductions. But he achieved a particular richness of craft as part of ensembles led by Henry Threadgill, whom he played alongside in various formations for eleven years. 

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 drew on the songwriting of Joni Mitchell and the compositional tradition of 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 his own trio, Harriet Tubman, with bassist Melvin Gibbs (of Defunkt and Rollins Band fame) and drummer JT Lewis (of the David Murray Quartet). In his latest configuration, 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 tunes with the cavernous washes of melody and Ross’s own gnarled, nearly-wrathful shredding on electric guitar.