Love is a key theme for trumpeter Brandon Woody and his band Upendo’s impressive debut for Blue Note. Indeed, the band’s name is a word for love in Swahili. But the album is also a study in the power of resilience, as composition titles including “Never Gonna Run Away” and “Perseverance” attest. There is a strong anthemic character in the six pieces on the album that bespeaks of a love of community, including Woody’s feelings for his home city of Baltimore, whilst also bringing us the spirit of gospel and the message that we shall overcome. These are emotions that suffuse the album and underpin it. The songs are based on memorable melodic fragments and riffs and Woody and the other musicians bring in a hard-bop sensibility to their performances, swinging and soulful, both connected to jazz history but contemporary in its feel.
Upendo’s other members are Troy Long (piano, keys), Quincy Phillips (drums) and Michael Saunders (bass). The band was formed in 2017 and the relaxed excellence with which they play together is apparent throughout. On the first composition, “Never Gonna Run Away”, they are joined by Imani-Grace guesting on vocals. Troy Long’s delicate piano opening sets the introspective atmosphere before Woody delivers his first solo in a controlled, quicksilver tone. Phillips’s elastic drumming and Saunders’s subtle bass have real understated presence throughout, adding to the soloist’s impact and Imani-Grace’s tender vocals as they interpret the vulnerability and strength of the song’s theme.
Woody has spoken of his admiration for ‘hot’ trumpet players like Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan and Woody Shaw and this is lineage is evident in his technical facility on the other five tracks. But there is also a deep appreciation of dynamics in his blowing as well as a certainty of narrative being offered to the listener. This is immediately apparent in one of the stand-outs, “Perseverance”, where the lovely opening melody is followed by another excellent fast controlled solo, the instrument’s timbre simultaneously driving and warm. The track oscillates between slower rhythmic elements driven by the other instruments, in particular Phillips’s tasteful drumming, and Woody’s imaginative and rhythmically on-point soloing, his trumpet almost telling you to keep on keeping on.
A different take on his soloing is provided by the beautiful ballad “We, Ota Benga”, presumably a reflection on and tribute to the life of Mbuti man Ota Benga, who was taken from Africa and scandalously exhibited in the United States, including as a human zoo exhibit at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. Here the opening trumpet melody draws you in before opening out into a glorious solo, with urgent and passionate flurries of notes, and Long’s beautiful and sparse underpinning piano notes lifting the listener as the Woody builds to the theme once more. It is inspiring and moving in equal measure, ending with a lovely separated coda. Overall, this a seriously impressive debut by the twenty-something Woody, with the album’s stated themes married with a narrative lyricism of a high order.
