| Jazz |
Brandon Sanders: In the Key of Memory
Every time Brandon Sanders steps into a jazz club, a ghost seems to walk in with him, the warm, lingering presence of his grandmother. Long before he became a drummer and composer of growing renown, there was her club in Kansas City, a place humming with brass, laughter, and cigarette smoke. For Sanders, that was where it all began, during those childhood summers of the 1970s and late ’80s, when he would visit her and find himself surrounded by the heartbeat of live music. It was not a classroom, but a communion. He didn’t so much learn jazz as breathe it.
For a young boy destined to become an artist, it was the perfect vantage point: a front-row seat to a world of musicians whose artistry would later shape his own sense of rhythm, form, and spirit. The club was his initiation, and every cymbal crash, every whispered bass line, carries traces of that early baptism in sound.
So it feels almost poetic that Sanders’s latest album should shimmer with the same warmth and vitality that once filled his grandmother’s club. The project is a revelation, generous, pulsing, and deeply human. After winning over critics with two previous releases, Sanders takes a bold step forward here, pushing further into the terrain of emotion, craft, and memory. The album’s brilliance lies not only in its compositions but in the constellation of musicians gathered around him: a band that feels both rooted and restless.
Among them is the masterful pianist Eric Scott Reed, a central voice in contemporary jazz and one of those rare musicians capable of transforming any ensemble he touches. Reed’s dialogue with Sanders is mesmerizing, an exchange that feels less like accompaniment and more like two old friends finishing each other’s sentences in rhythm. Their musical chemistry gives the record its glow, its quiet urgency.
And then there’s Jazzmeia Horn. Her voice, radiant and commanding, adds a dimension that is both intimate and transcendent, a light that deepens the record’s emotional range. Her phrasing brings new color to Sanders’s compositions, inviting listeners to lean closer, to listen differently.
To understand this album is to open a personal diary of sorts, a collection of musical reflections that reveal Sanders’s own map of influences. Here are nods to Gershwin, Mal Waldron, and Reed himself, as well as original compositions that reveal Sanders’s evolving identity as a composer. Each piece unfolds like a story. In “Tales of Mississippi,” for example, Sanders plays with an elegance that’s almost cinematic: precise yet fluid, delicate yet driving. It’s post-bop that smiles knowingly toward the past, music that would have made Miles Davis nod, maybe even reach for his horn.
For Sanders, jazz has always been about continuity, about connecting threads that stretch from past to present. “It’s about intention,” he says, “more than style.” The album’s spirit owes as much to that philosophy as to his other calling: social work. Yes, Sanders spends part of his life offstage, working to lift up those who’ve lost their footing. “It’s about trying to lift people’s spirits,” he explains. “That’s what I do as a social worker, and it’s what I try to do as a musician. To make sure people leave feeling differently than when they arrived.”
It’s in that intersection, between art and empathy, that Sanders finds his true rhythm. Jazz, as he understands it, is not only a music of improvisation but of care. Like all great jazz artists before him, Sanders plays as a witness to his time: attuned to its anxieties, its hopes, its fragile humanity. His music listens back.
That’s why, beyond its technical precision or stylistic finesse, this record resonates. It feels alive. The album’s eight tracks are less a showcase of virtuosity than an act of generosity, a conversation among musicians who trust one another completely, and who understand that the best jazz is always a gift offered, never imposed.
Sometimes, an album doesn’t just play, it speaks. It reminds you that sound can be a form of solace, that rhythm can carry memory, that sincerity can be as complex as harmony. Brandon Sanders’s new album does exactly that: it listens, it comforts, it uplifts. It’s jazz as it was always meant to be, not just art, but an act of humanity.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, November 7th 2025
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Musicians :
Brandon Sanders : batterie
Jazzmeia Horn: vocal (tracks 3 and 8)
Eric Scott Reed: piano (tracks 1-7)
Stacy Dillard: tenor saxophone
Warren Wolf: vibes
Eric Wheeler: bass (tracks 1-7)
Ameen Saleem: bass (track 8)
Tyler Bullock: piano (track 8)
Track Listing :
- 1. 8/4 Beat
- 2. Lasting Impressin
- 3. Our Love Is Here to Stay
- 4. Shadoboxing
- 5. Tales of Mississippi
- 6. Soul Eyes
- 7. No BS for B.S.
- 8. Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do)