Chris Potter “Alive With Ghosts Today”
Dubbed “the most commandingly skilled saxophonist of his generation” by The New York Times, the commensurately restless Chris Potter has long looked to unlikely sources for inspiration: his struggle with Meniere’s disease for 1998’s Vertigo, the epic of The Odyssey for 2013’s The Sirens, and the tale of abolitionist John Brown’s antebellum insurrection for 2026’s Alive With Ghosts Today. Something of a local phenom in his South Carolina hometown, Potter headed north to New York at 18, attending the Manhattan School of Music and quickly connecting with esteemed elders. In playing with trumpeter Red Rodney, for instance, he had a direct historic linkage with Charlie Parker. In the early ’90s, he worked both with rising jazz luminaries, like Brad Mehldau and Nate Smith, and those a generation or two beyond, including Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, and John Scofield, his band for 1997’s Unspoken. After stints with Steely Dan, he quit from the tedium of playing the same material every night for enormous crowds not locked in on every change.
Potter bridges generations with the band he assembled for Ghosts Today, an eight-song conceptual set that brings an open heart to its historical seed. Bill Frisell is the esteemed elder, his playing winding through “Osawatomie Brown” with understated swagger; drummer Smith, a longtime Potter collaborator, leads “Mine Eyes” with patience and confidence. But the rest of the ensemble—violinist Sara Caswell, trombonist Zekkereya El-Magharbel, clarinetist Rane Moore, bassist Burniss Travis—are rising jazz stars. Though the idea of an album about Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 suggests heaviness, the melodies are bright and the band fluid, often turning a shared spotlight on Brown’s action to wonder about the cost of liberation, about what comes after martyrdom. Potter brings Alive With Ghosts Today—lauded by PopMatters for pairing “the heavy elements of its theme with bursts of creative joy”—to Big Ears 2027.
