Saxophonist-composer Jimmy Greene will tell you exactly how he is feeling. Frank, sensitive, Greene sounds restlessly but serenely at peace with the harshest topic there is, having lost a child to the senselessness of murder. Yet no matter what he will say about the death of his daughter, Ana Grace Márquez-Greene, during the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of December 2012, it is through the sheer elegance and radiant uplift of his music where you best sense deep unutterable pain, and his reach for delight in her name.
Greene’s albums Beautiful Life (2014), Flowers: Beautiful Life, Volume 2 (2017) and While Looking Up (2020) were written and recorded in dedication to his daughter. These records sound as if they are striving to understand horror, to make sense of sorrow. So is the new album, As We Are Now.
Yet from its soul-searching sacred music ripe with Hammond B3 organ (Greene is part of the ministry at his church, Glory Chapel International Cathedral), to the secular swing of the Charleston and the rhythm of the saints that is the inspiration of Brazilian percussion, you can feel Greene reaching for strength to carry on throughout every chord passage and rippling solo, to march with what may pass for joy into the future — for him and his family — while carrying a torch in Ana Grace’s name.
On the night after playing at New York’s Smoke Jazz Club as part of the Tenor Titans Quintet in celebration of John Coltrane, it was curious for me to align much of what Greene does to that subject of tribute, how much of his work holds a similar spiritual sway and holy density.
“I am sure that my reliance upon God steers me, and that the music just follows,” says Greene from his Connecticut home base. “Music is a reflection of an artist’s life, a mirror. My relationship to God cannot help but be manifest in everything that I do. … Faith is my constant.”
Since 2000 and his major label debut, Brand New World (RCA Victor), Greene’s aesthetic has evolved from a sharp, sinewy brand of post-bop to something rounder, more robust and etched in a rainbow’s wealth of emotion by the time of Beautiful Life, and now, the prismatic As We Are Now.
“With whatever resources that we have at our disposal, to share with others Is necessary,” he says of making mental health a priority for him and his family (including his wife, flutist and family therapist Nelba Márquez-Greene). “The music reflects this, what we hold to be important. All of what we have going on inside. Dealing with grief is never a linear experience. You don’t get better, then never grieve again. There is grief, there is joy, there are elements of deep gratitude I felt within the hours and days after Ana was murdered. I was grateful that I had this person in my life. I remember her joyfully.”
Even today, over 12 years since that horror, Greene says that there are moments of “deep pain mixed in with joy” as part of the struggle of staying sane and sonically, soulfully optimistic. “The ability to feel many things, sometimes all at once, is what guides this music.”
With that, Beautiful Life, While Looking Up and As We Are Now sound very much of a piece — three chapters, one book — as they do radically different from each other.
“Those first two albums were very much focused on my daughter, and have a very strong seed,” says the saxophonist. “This one is me taking stock of where I am personally, with the ‘we’ referring to my family, and, to a small degree, the greater community around us.”
While Beautiful Life was intended to be just Greene and his team at play (pianist Aaron Goldberg, guitarist Mike Moreno, bassist Dezron Douglas, drummer Jonathan Barber), producer David Chesky requested a children’s choir. As that sound swelled, Greene heard the lushness of strings soaring along. “It started off as one thing, and grew over time,” he recalls.
For the mostly stripped-bare affair of As We Are Now, made with support from Chamber Music America, the ruminating exceptions to that spare sound stick out deliciously. In addition to Shedrick Mitchell’s organ on tracks such as “Praises,” Greene brings a contemplative simmer to “Anhelando” with the warmly winsome percussive samba kick of Rogerio Boccato. “Rogerio is the one who exposed me to the Brazilian rhythms I’ve used, over 10 years ago when I was doing doctoral studies at Manhattan School of Music.”
“Anhelando” (which translates to “longing” in Spanish) and “Unburdened” both speak to Greene’s late daughter; the former describing his feeling for longing for her presence (“and reunion with her”), while the latter touches on Greene’s vision of what her spirit is at present. “The great hope I have is that one day my spirit will soar with hers and feel a similar sense of being unburdened.”
Then there is the giddily surprising “Impatient,” a track where Greene pulls out his soprano saxophone and allows his heart to dance. This song comes from Greene considering two of his mentors and their prolific wealth of compositions, Horace Silver and Tom Harrell.
“You’d look at the pages that Tom would bring out for us to practice, and they would each have several dates in the right-hand corner, corresponding to when different parts were written,” says Greene. “He’d save a little bit and move forward a little bit. That’s similar to what I did when writing ‘Impatient.’ I had two bars of a melodic idea that I couldn’t let go until I figured out how to work with it. It’s a four-bar phrase but the actual melody is two bars long. And it came piece by piece, a lot of architecture to figure out.”
The Charleston rhythm that steers “Impatient” comes from the Harlem stride piano great James P. Johnson, “a foundational pulse of our music,” notes Greene of a groove that inspired him and guitarist Moreno to juke through seamlessly. “Its tempo is over-exuberant,” he declares. “I came up with this feeling of impatience and ran with it.”
Impatience and impertinence are equal partners in the harried “Flood Stage,” its inspiration culled from Wayne Shorter’s tumultuous “Pinocchio” as well as another life tragedy to affect the Greene family from the famous Connecticut rainstorm of 2024. Then there is Greene’s hot take on Kurt Weill’s cool “Speak Low,” with tenor sax flying dreamily atop an Afro-Cuban groove, until the reed voice begins to move more determinedly — firmly, with rough friction — as the rhythm itself grows more tough and taut.
“I was inspired by a recording of Roy Hargrove playing ‘Speak Low,’ the key that he chose, D flat major,” Greene recalls. “There’s a certain resonance there that I really loved — I fully looked into that, and the Afro-Cuban rumba clave – and the guitar offered so many possibilities, harmonizing the melody and textures in tandem with the saxophone.”
Pulling away from continuous sorrow to attain (or reclaim) a sense of play, the back-and-forth vibrations of As We Are Now can also be witnessed in its roughly painted cover art, a nature-driven work known as “Together,” commissioned by Greene’s wife and gifted to the family by Connecticut-based artist Kate Ten Eyck.
“When I was considering what the cover for this album should be, that work by our friend Kate — which is hanging in our house — I just thought, ‘Wow,’” says the saxophonist of a massive grouping of tall trees, all naked and defiant once passed through winter, with blue skies radiant behind them.
“My wife asked her to paint something reflecting who and what our family was at that point. I know Kate and her husband Noah since ninth grade. She’s a brilliant artist. So she created these four trees, together, before their leaves would begin to sprout in April. And these trees are strong and healthy, in a beautiful field, all anticipating spring. I feel as if this represents where my family and I are, and the joy that we get from our faith.” JT