Fast-Rising Drummer Brandon Sanders Readies Ambitious New Album The Tables Will Turn, Out October 4, 2024 On Savant Records
In-demand jazz drummer Brandon Sanders has announced the October 4, 2024 release of his sophomore album The Tables Will Turn on Savant Records.
Featuring vibraphonist Warren Wolf, pianist Keith Brown, bassist David Wong and reedist Chris Lewis the album features classics from Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk alongside compositions by McCoy Tyner and Tony Williams. There’s also Duke Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss” and a Michael Jackson tune, both vocal numbers where Christie Dashielljoins the quintet.
“I'm an against-all-odds type of person,” Sanders says, sitting in his Brooklyn home. The 53-year-old drummer took a circuitous route to The Tables Will Turn — the follow-up to his debut, Compton’s Finest.
Sanders left his California home to attend the University of Kansas in the mid-’90s and studied communications, while also walking onto the school’s Division I basketball team. He would go on to earn an advanced degree in social work, before heading to the Berklee College of Music — and forming a decades-long bond with vibraphonist Warren Wolf — when he was 25 years old.
“I've always liked the way that Brandon plays,” Wolf said recently while driving around Baltimore. “A lot of drummers nowadays — and definitely back then — were always trying to show one another up. But Brandon, what he did on the drums, he stayed in the pocket. It’s just very comfortable playing with him.”
Sanders readily accessing the groove belies the potentially treacherous road he’s traversed. A part of that journey’s related on his composition “Central and El Segundo,” a tune written about a time and place in the drummer’s past growing up in Compton, California that still affects how he interacts with the world.
“The whole thing with this record is, no matter how rough life gets or no matter where you're from, if you stick with what you believe and stick with your mission, the tables will turn,” Sanders said. “So, you have a guy getting chased at the intersection of Central and El Segundo in Compton, and he stuck with it. To be honest, at 19 years old, I told someone I wanted to play the drums, and he said, ‘Man, if you hadn't started at 3 years old, forget it.’”
While working to finish the album, the drummer and Wolf individually took a shot at devising the tracklist — and concocted strikingly similar visions, saving the title track, “The Tables Will Turn,” for the record’s conclusion.
It’s a gospel-inflected soul jazz tune with a message as ebullient as its groove — an ideal way to end a recording devoted to the idea that perseverance is really just the prelude to success.
Sanders embodies that idea, too: succeeding at multiple levels of the higher-education system and then using his accrued knowledge to help a new generation of students as a counselor at the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York.
Bandleader Willie Jones III, who first met the drummer about a decade back, has produced both of Sanders’ recordings for Savant Records and watched the Compton native’s compositional acumen grow.
“What Brandon is doing, it's really incredible. I mean, his level of hustle is off the chain,” Jones said. “He has a passion for the music — for something that, to most people, is a hobby. But he feels so deeply about this and is so passionate about it. He's out here all the time, checking out music, checking out records. And all the while, he's raising three boys. He has to wake up in the morning, take his kids to school and go to work. Then he's also booking gigs himself? That, to me, that’s next level.”
Sanders, who’s already begun working out ideas for his third leader date, said he never saw jazz as a way to make money or earn notoriety. It’s a forum to tell his own story.
“At 25, I didn't know a paradiddle from a double-stroke roll,” he said. “I just stuck with it.”
Brandon Sanders On Tour:
9/15 – White Plains Jazz Festival – White Plains, NY
9/16-17 – Lied Center at the University of Kansas – Lawrence, KS
9/26 – Scullers Jazz Club – Boston, MA
10/18-19 – Seattle Jazz Fellowship – Seattle, WA
Brandon Sanders Online:
Website
YouTube
Instagram
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