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Brian Blade & The Fellowship Band - Body and Shadow [BlueNote] 2017 FLAC

Brian Blade & The Fellowship Band marks its 20th anniversary in 2017 with the release of their sublime fifth album, Body and Shadow, a succinct nine-track meditation on lightness/darkness that arrives like a balm for the soul, ebbing and flowing with grace, subtlety and no shortness of beauty.

Formed in 1997, the band released their eponymous Blue Note debut in 1998, but the bond among the musicians goes back even further. Brian Blade, the band’s namesake and drummer, first met pianist Jon Cowherd in 1988 while attending Loyola University in New Orleans, and they met bassist Chris Thomas in the Crescent City a year later. With Myron Walden (alto saxophone and bass clarinet) and Melvin Butler (tenor saxophone), the Fellowship Band’s sturdy unified bond (“we think of the band as a collective instrument,” Cowherd says) has evolved with every album, and Body and Shadow, which also features Denver-based guitarist Dave Devine, is an extension of that evolution.

Blade and Cowherd wrote, arranged and produced the songs for Body and Shadow, which was recorded at the historic Columbus Theatre in Providence, Rhode Island. The experience reminded Blade of recording the band’s debut with producer Daniel Lanois at the Teatro, a former movie theater in Oxnard, California.

“It is always great to be in the moment and in process with the band,” says Blade. “We come in with all our grand plans and then there’s this yielding to, ‘Okay, here’s what’s actually being captured.’ Maybe not what I thought but another feeling, another energy, which is unpredictable. There’s joy in the whole mystery of what we are hoping to create. You step into the process to see what you’re made of, individually and together. Since we’ve shared so much time together, that trust and the sort of inherent knowing of what’s needed for each other kicks in pretty quick.”

Blade can be a nuanced colorist or a mighty force at the drums and the songs composed for Body and Shadow could be seen as snapshots of a band balancing that light and darkness that exists in all of us. Blade says the album’s luminous and airy opener, “Within Everything,” is about “believing that you’re created to be one of a kind and that you do have a purpose in your life and there is a reason that you are here right now. I believe that light should not be extinguished in anyone. That confidence and that faith, everyone should know this for themselves. That song sort of speaks to that spirit of what I feel is the divine plan. I guess we all have doubt about so much in life but hopefully we can renew our confidence daily.”