When the jazz saxophonist James Brandon Lewis sat in with experimental rock and post-punk trio the Messthetics at a gig in Brooklyn in October 2021, something interesting happened.
Over the previous decade, New York-based Lewis had established himself as one of the most exhilarating new forces in modern jazz. Topping polls and picking up rising star awards, he had released a series of highly original and conceptually ambitious albums integrating blues, gospel, free jazz, funk, hip-hop and spoken word. His commanding and propulsive tone had also earned him favourable comparisons to such tenor masters as John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Albert Ayler. Lewis was the jazz saxophonist of the moment.
Formed in Washington DC in 2016, the Messthetics was a union of the bassist Joe Lally and the drummer Brendan Canty – the rock-solid rhythm section of the legendary American post-hardcore band Fugazi – and the much admired genre-defying guitarist Anthony Pirog.
Between 1986 and 2003, Fugazi had developed a peerless reputation for their staunch independence, resolute DIY ethic, political engagement – and fearless, full-throttle live shows. Pirog was an upcoming and free-moving alt-guitar maestro whose playing seemed boundless – from jazz to psych-rock, electronic to contemporary classical, noise to country.
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This particular fusion of powerful musical forces, however, was no guarantee of success, especially live. There were some precedents for bands merging various strands of adventurous rock with jazz and improvisation – a highly selective roll-call would include Frank Zappa, the Grateful Dead, King Crimson, Steely Dan, James Chance and the Contortions, Living Colour and John Zorn’s Naked City.
Yet not all marriages are equal or even desirable; often something can be compromised, diluted or lost. If you blend melodic instrumental music with easy-listening pop and R&B, does it not unavoidably lead to the vapidity of smooth jazz?
To say what happened 4½ years ago on that stage in Brooklyn is the diametric opposite of jazz lite-and-polite may be the understatement of the century.
“James had played a couple of tunes with us in New York a couple of years before, and the miracle was not only that he wanted to do it again, but also that having him on board elevated everything – the music, the room, the audience – to a new level,” says Brendan Canty, from his home in Washington DC.
“I mean, James is completely open as a musician; he can do anything. He can play softly and beautifully – and as big and loud as you can imagine; his tone is insane. We’re always trying to push the songs, but James jacked them up into this other stratosphere.”
Lewis felt something similar. “I just remember the energy,” he says, from his apartment in Brooklyn. “I’m 42 now, and I have a bit more nuance to my playing, but at that time I wanted fire at all costs. We were just, like, going for it, and the feel, the chemistry I had with everyone, was just right – specifically with the drums. I love the drums and I’ve since said to Brendan, like, ‘Hey man, you can’t get energetic enough.’ Because he’d always ask me, ‘Hey, is everything … ?’ And I’m like, ‘Yo, just play, dog. You play; we going to vibe’.”
The Messthetics had “found a true kindred spirit” and soon after, the band became a quartet. While Canty says it seemed a natural progression, he is also keen to stress that a significant part of the success of the group is down to the special connection between Pirog and Lewis; it was Pirog who had first suggested Lewis join the trio on stage.
“Anthony’s the greatest guitar player I’ve ever played with, and to hear him and James play these really wild-ass melodies and sometimes difficult tunes, in such unison, is really cool and unusual,” says Canty. “It’s a beautiful sound.”
Pirog and Lewis had first played together on a 2014 recording led by the celebrated avant-garde drummer William Hooker; the guitarist had subsequently guested on two Lewis albums, No Filter and An Unruly Manifesto, and they had formed a bond. “It’s a kind of spiritual synchronicity – that we’re still baffled by,” says Lewis. “The way we perceive and compose melodies, for instance, is very similar. Sometimes we feel like we’re in each other’s heads.”
The same can no doubt be said for the other two members of the band, Lally and Canty, who go back 40 years and reconnected in 2015 after Lally returned to Washington from Rome. Following Fugazi’s “indefinite hiatus” in 2003, Canty missed the mysterious alchemy of playing drums with Lally. “Joe’s just so solid and he allows me to f**k around and be my annoying self,” Canty has said.
He also knew that Pirog was the perfect guitarist for Lally’s new music, and soon after, the Messthetics were born. Tunes grew organically and collaboratively out of regular practice sessions; there was no one leader or director of the band or music. Two smart and sonically expansive power-trio albums followed.
Signing to the fabled jazz imprint Impulse! Records following Lewis’s integration into the group, the Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis released a much-praised eponymous album in 2024. It’s a record of complex yet catchy melodies, free-flowing improvisation, avant-metal guitar, sonorous bass lines, driving rock and funk grooves, ambient ballads – and a whole lot more. The album may have ruffled some purist feathers in the jazz, post-punk and progressive rock worlds, yet it significantly expanded the band’s audience, especially among those with curious ears.
Over the past two years or so, the group has also shown a strong commitment to touring, both in the US and Europe. Fugazi was famous as a definitively live band that played more than a thousand shows – devotees in Ireland still talk adoringly about the group’s incendiary late-90s gigs at such venues as McGonagles in Dublin, Friary Hall in Kilkenny and Nancy Spains in Cork. It’s a tradition that the Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis have enthusiastically embraced and extended.
“We always said in Fugazi that the record is the menu and the live show is the meal,” says Canty, who is 60 next month. “The same applies to the Messthetics and James. Live, we’re learning about each other, trusting each other and developing with each other.
“We’re literally pushing all the time. This is a band that has been forged, and that really exists, on stage.”
Lewis shares such a philosophy. “I like to play like it’s my last time playing, and with these gentlemen, that sentiment is the same – and it always has been.
“Trust me, we’ve played a couple of hundred shows by now and I’ve seen the reverence that Brendan and Joe are shown in their community. They’re like the Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison [of the John Coltrane Quartet] of punk music.”
On Friday the Messthetics and Lewis release a second album, Deface the Currency, shaped by the knowledge and understanding they have built on the road. It’s a significant advance. The titanic and often thunderous tunes remain, as do Pirog and Lewis’s commitment to a kind of controlled dissonance, yet you can also hear a greater group authority and cohesion.
“The more you know someone, the better the relationship is, the more enriched it becomes,” Lewis says, in the album press release. “It’s like a cast-iron skillet: the more you keep cooking in it, the better the food gets.”
While James Brandon Lewis’s jazz credentials are beyond question, the knowledge and passion that Brendan Canty has for the music is somewhat more surprising. His father was “an amazing stride piano player” and keen record collector who introduced Canty to such canonical jazz figures as Bix Beiderbecke, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. Canty says he is “drawn to jazzos”. Live, the Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis have been playing avant-jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock’s volcanic 1991 album Ask the Ages – in its entirety.
Just how much of a jazz band are the Messthetics? “Well, I was asked that early on and I think I joked ‘about 20 per cent’,” says Canty. “But now, with James joining us, I would say … what, 58 per cent?” And the remainder? “I mean, I’m still a post-punk rock skronk drummer. I try to be as honest as I can on stage. I cannot show up as anybody but me.”
As a proud Irish-American who, on his father’s side, can trace his roots back to Drimoleague and Skibbereen in west Cork, and via his mother’s McGowan family tree to Limerick, Canty says he is looking forward to playing in Dublin again. “The scene in Ireland was really important to us in Fugazi; there was always a real palpable energy to the place,” he says. “Yeah, Dublin is still one of my absolute favourite places to play.”
Lewis also appreciates the group’s audiences. “The beautiful thing about this collaboration – apart from the humility of the band, and the fact that they’re all good-hearted humans – is that the people who come and see us are never just punk rockers or just jazz people. It’s mixed. Like the music.
“And when that music gets to a high, when we reach across lines of demarcation where genre is completely obliterated, some people at our concerts have said to us, ‘Man, I’m not sure what that was, but I know it was amazing.’ And, you know, that’s the highest compliment.”
Deface the Currency is released on Impulse! Records on Friday, February 20th. The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis play Belfast and Dublin in November; dates to be announced.
