Brian Blade & The Fellowship Band marks its 20th anniversary 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. The album will be released on vinyl and CD, and will be available on all digital retailers and streaming services, on November 10. The lead track “Broken Leg Days” is available today to stream, download, or receive immediately with album download pre-order.
Formed in 1997, the Fellowship 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.”
“I think we have a lot of hope for the world and ourselves and the desire to create something which will move or touch people,” Cowherd adds. “There’s a spiritual background to the band. We come from a foundation of playing music that is inspirational and I think we all want it to be intellectually interesting, too.”
Within Everything
Body and Shadow (Noon)
Traveling Mercies
Have Thine Own Way, Lord (Solo)
Have Thine Own Way, Lord (Band)
Body and Shadow (Morning)
Duality
Body and Shadow (Night)
Broken Leg Days
Brian Blade: drums
Jon Cowherd: piano, harmonium, mellotron
Chris Thomas: bass
Melvin Butler: tenor saxophone
Myron Walden: alto saxophone, bass clarinet
Dave Devine: guitar
