Long a big man on the tenor saxophone campus, Chris Potter has never rested on his laurels, still hungry to make a significant statement significantly different from the one he made before. Alive With Ghosts Today (May 8, 2026, Edition Records) manifests Potter as a saxophonist/composer/bandleader still in his prime for all three of these roles.
Potter’s guiding light for this project is the story of the notorious American abolitionist John Brown, who led armed and bloody anti-slavery activities in the run up to the American Civil War that exposed and illuminated a deep, complicated divide in American society. Potter felt it’s time to address that divide of which Brown symbolized that persists today. Of course, as an instrumentalist, Potter doesn’t address it through words. He pored his energies toward distilling uniquely American music forms into something uniquely himself.
He built a wholly new conventional base band of a bassist (Burniss Travis), drummer, (Nate Smith) and guitarist (Bill Frisell) but expanded it further with a venturesome combination of clarinet (Rane Moore), trombone (Zekkereya El-Magharbel) and violin (Sara Caswell). On reading this I assumed that Potter was going for something intentionally exotic or evocative of a long-forgotten era, but that’s not the case here at all. He was merely looking for the right sound, one that springs new life from vintage uniquely American styles like blues, gospel and even adapting some harmonic concepts from the Dean of American Classical Music, Aaron Copland. This band is too large to be wooly, too small to be ceremonial, a key decision Potter made that elevated his music.
The big name everyone will surely notice here is Bill Frisell, and as an absolute lord in evoking the dustiest folk forms while staying grounded in the present, there’s really no other guitarist for carrying out Potter’s mission. Unsurprisingly, Frisell seems to get the plot innately. Potter’s contemporary composing style shines through on the funky “Osawatomie Brown” and Frisell is assigned a solo spot, one where he’s unbothered by the suddenly quickening tempo and delivers shimmering, refreshingly unfussy lines.
The special supplemental trio lends a lilting grace to “The Heavens In Scarlet,” a multi-motif song that’s made even better by Potter proficiently deploying the instruments at his disposal and topping it off with premium tenor sax that puts just the right sentiment in the right spots.
Travis, by the way, plays electric bass, not acoustic, and his spidery bass line at the very center of “Sister Annie” is a reminder of that and the important groove element he brings that keeps these song from sagging.
“This Earth Would Have No Charms For Me” isn’t a blues, but the blues feel is pervasive, especially when Potter steps up to wail. “Into Africa” is where the Potter/Moore/El-Magharbel/Caswell front is nimbly deployed inside Potter’s prescribed shifting harmonics and taut, dynamic rhythms. He lends an orchestral touch that doesn’t smother individual contributions.
Over a jumping pulse, Potter and Moore harmonize on “Mine Eyes” and the song later goes into suspended mode as El-Magharbel lets loose an unanchored solo that perhaps incidentally touches on Eastern sounds before winding through a buttoned-up classical segue and finally landing on a relaxed final go-around of the theme. Potter covers a lot of bases of this track but manages to hold it all together.
It might seem odd that Chris Potter would look far back to provide for stimulus for music that speaks to the present but like our cultural faults lines, the music’s fault lines have persisted through all those years. Alive With Ghosts Today shows the superior art that is produced when those lines are blurred.
Pre-order/order Alive With Ghosts Today from Bandcamp.
