ANTHONY BRANKER
For as long as humanity has been drawing borders – literal and metaphorical – we have struggled with issues of inclusion and belonging. A glance at any random day’s headlines will inevitably include debates over civil rights, immigration, refugee crises, political divisions – all the latest manifestations of those eternal conflicts of in-groups and outsiders, us versus them.
Composer Dr. Anthony Branker takes a prismatic view of these notions on his stirring new album What Place Can Be For Us? A Suite in Ten Movements, his eighth release on Origin Records. Due out February 17, 2023, What Place Can Be For Us? is Branker’s second outing with his forward-looking ensemble Imagine, expanded to a septet with saxophonists Walter Smith III and Remy Le Boeuf, trumpeter Philip Dizack, guitarist Pete McCann, pianist Fabian Almazan, bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Donald Edwards. Vocalist Alison Crockett guests on two moving tracks.
Now on the jazz studies faculty at Rutgers following his retirement from Princeton University, Branker has conducted major works by Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard and Duke Ellington as well as composing for his ensembles Imagine, Word Play, and Ascent. Imagine, which debuted with 2016’s Beauty Within, was conceived as a vehicle for Branker’s most advanced compositional ideas. The current version of the group features a younger generation of musicians whose concepts resonate with the composer’s own – many of them former students from his time at the Manhattan School of Music.
“They share a different sensibility about the way they approach music making,” Branker says. “They are definitely risk takers, with creative concepts that are very engaging to my ears and in line with how I think about writing music at this point in my life, which is always evolving.”
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