For Living Lovers - Natural Name (2025)

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For Living Lovers - Natural Name (2025)

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As a musician begins to develop, he or she is essentially a product of influences. Musical syntax is developed by study, repetition, and memorization. Often a musician becomes a life-long recycler of artifice, never truly finding their unique musical identity or language. Choosing their authentic selves and inhabiting their own sound world through their collaboration has been the essential goal for guitarist Brandon Ross and acoustic bass guitarist Stomu Takeishi. Their duo, For Living Lovers, returns with Natural Name, a moving display of their interlocking values and incredible interplay.

Ross has been on a path to musical clarity from his earliest days as a player. Receiving early encouragement from legends like Ornette Coleman and Archie Shepp, Ross was counseled to realize that he possessed the tools necessary to be a musician and what he really needed to do was to remove himself from the distractions of influence or striving for approval. He needed to define his own voice.

The guitarist found an equal partner and communicator in Takeishi whom he recruited as a member of Henry Threadgill’s Make a Move band in the mid-1990s. The duo created For Living Lovers two decades ago using Ross’ compositions and adopting a concept informed by Threadgill’s unique intervallic organization system. The system yields what might be called a pan-tonal structure for composition and developing improvisation, both highly specific yet inspiringly unbounded by diatonicism.

The music that For Living Lovers creates is unique in sound, structure, and texture. Performing on acoustic string instruments designed by world renowned luthier Steve Klein, the duo’s sound is natural, resonant, and full of personality. The forms of Ross’ original compositions are built to provide a context for him and Takeishi to create and develop music in the moment, eluding staid responses and reflexive patterns. As the primary composer, Ross takes these elements and a wide variety of visual and philosophical influences to inform the pieces for the duo.

The recordings that were compiled to create Natural Name come from two different performance occasions. The bulk of the music was recorded while the duo was in residence at the inaugural Cheswatyr Residency at Looking Glass Arts in September 2024. Ross and Takeishi were afforded two full days of rehearsal along with two days of recording in The Barn, Looking Glass Arts’ former dairy barn turned recording studio. Three additional pieces were included from a For Living Lovers performance at the Yamaha Music Salon in New York City from February 2019.

The recording begins appropriately with “Pioneer,” a tone-setting excursion where guitar and bass patiently but insistently forge a winding musical path. The quasi-open-air nature of The Barn allowed a dying wingless wasp into the duo’s recording session, eventually leading to Takeishi being stung. “Pollinator” memorializes the incident with Ross’ voice-like-singing banjo introduction, ultimately ending with a detuned bass guitar’s abrupt demise. Ross wrote the moody “Pan” from the support of Jazz Coalition’s pandemic-era grant commissioning project. The elliptical composition’s title references the ancient nature god, Pan; the musical concept of pan-tonality; and the classic adage: “Out of the frying pan, into the fire,” which served as touchstones during the uncertain days of the pandemic lockdown. The open ended-ness is belied by the piece’s structured sections and predetermined directionality which the duo deftly navigates from bombast to subtlety.

Ross’ “Jenkins of Alhambra” is dedicated to the guitarist’s former mentor, colleague, and friend, the late violinist Leroy Jenkins. Written on a flamenco guitar, the piece reflects phrasing reminiscent of Jenkins’ musical language and compositional style with a titular nod to the master’s inimitable brilliance. The sedate “Broken Waves, Fallen Trees” is a sort of tone poem created by structured but independent motion and development between the bass and guitar. Ornette Coleman’s slyly playful “Race Face” morphs into “O. People,” a tribute composition by Ross for Ornette and another saxophone giant, Oliver Lake, while Ross’s “LLARW (for Liv)” is a gorgeous ballad-like piece written for the young daughter of a beloved friend.

Born of a Chamber Music America New Jazz Works commission, “Hammer” takes its inspiration from a moving work of photography by Carolina Muñoz, whose portraits of facial tissues, remnants from psychotherapy sessions, captured Ross’s imagination. “Open Circle” comes from the same period of work as “Hammer”. The piece features a cyclic approach, as it develops via recurring inversions intended to evoke a borderless feeling, like a circle without a perceivable circumference.

The intriguing “Bullseye” takes its name from Ross’ graphic score for the piece that has a circle intersected by two axes. The two musicians move from the outside of the circle, which provides a pitch reference, inward along the behavior of attack-indicating, horizontal lines, to an arpeggiated harmony introducing the succession of transitions. They flow through the piece, intersecting areas of indicated activity, until they complete their designated assignments. “From a High Place” concludes the program with a vocal composition born from a dream of “ordained union,” gratitude, and transcendence.

For Living Lovers continues to be a musical space for Brandon Ross and Stomu Takeishi to communicate authenticity in sound and act. This recording highlights emanations from two individuals who share the endeavor of “being musically one’s self,” eliciting an intimate stillness in which the illumination of the opportunities of the present moment can be heard and experienced beyond standard notions of style and genre. That is the heart of the music of For Living Lovers, delivered beautifully by its own authority on Natural Name.

Brandon Ross - acoustic guitar, soprano guitar, banjo, vocals
Stomu Takeishi - acoustic bass guitar