JAMES BRANDON LEWIS is an inventive and freedom-seeking tenor saxophonist, whose surging patterns of sound resonate all through the new album Molecular he’s cut with his quartet.

From an early age, he became interested in all the jazz greats: “Parker, Coltrane, Rollins and Ornette -— I love the whole continuum,” he tells me, “I loved the emotion they provoked.

“If  the music connects, then the genre doesn’t matter. I loved my hometown saxophone heroes Grover Washington and Charles Gayle and I gravitated to Joshua Redman as he was extremely popular. I was curious to know who he was checking out, which led me to Gene Ammons and countless others.”