Brandon Ross Can't Be Defined By Genre

The experimental guitarist has spent decades trying to shun arbitrary labels placed on Black music.

In early 2021, I got an email from Alex Arnold at Early Future Records about an upcoming reissue from the label that featured Steve Reid on drums, David Wertman on bass, and Brandon Ross on guitar. I’d known Wertman’s work through a recent reissue from another record label, BBE, which released an old free jazz album of his in 2019. But I didn’t know the work of the other two instrumentalists. Nonetheless, I played the album, Visions of the Third Eye, and liked it. I appreciated the trio’s delicate blend of turbulence and sustained calm, the way it adhered to traditional jazz without tethering to it. There were unforeseen twists that intrigued me, as if the band searched for something beyond the compositions they wrote, that thing beyond the paper that couldn’t be fathomed.

Call it ignorance or just plain fatigue, but I didn’t realize until recently that the Brandon Ross from Visions of the Third Eye is the same Brandon Ross from Off The End, one of my favorite albums of 2024. Released under the name Brandon Ross Phantom Station, Off The End treks through industrial sounds, with sharp edges and pronounced synths floating through a light mix of drums, electronic and acoustic guitars, piano and cornet. On purpose, it isn’t jazz, rock or anything, as genre truly doesn’t capture what’s happening on the album.

Intense yet spellbinding, Off The End pivots between soothing lulls and aggressive crescendos, the latter of which can land sharply on the ear at times. Regardless, it pulls me in, especially around the 7:30 mark of the song “Through the Heart of My Demarcation,” when the drums start crashing and the electronics get all glitchy. And again near the end of “The Gate Is Open,” where Ross’ modulated vocals flow into a rising wave of sirens, cascading percussion and quickened upper-register piano chords. I think it speaks to the unrest I’ve been feeling alongside the despair some of us might feel as rational humans navigating irrational times. In these moments on the album, I can almost hear the band playing through gritted teeth, their emotions heaving without losing control. Off The End is an exercise of patience and precision, the feeling of sound converging and disassembling, teetering on the verge of collapse. But it never does; in fact, it all hangs together quite masterfully, as if suspended in air, its imperfections left to shine with the gorgeous parts. It’s the type of music you can’t fully comprehend or turn completely away from.

Ross assembled his Phantom Station band as an individual-directed ensemble that created sounds on the spot without the restrictions of genre. Featuring the artist Hardedge on sound design; Graham Haynes on cornet and electronics; David Virelles on keyboards and piano; and JT Lewis on drums, Off The End is fully improvised, each band member given the green light to self-orchestrate. “Real music made in real time by real people,” as Ross says near the album’s end. Still, despite his push against arbitrary labels, I hear the blues coming through the bandleader’s guitar on the song “Immaculate Toes,” a lighter track compared with the LP’s heavier material, and a sort of classical, folk-influenced ambience at the beginning of “I Can See All of This,” before sullen piano chords bring the mood back down.

Yet this isn’t a dark album; rather, there’s plenty of light shining through. The end of the song “Your Shoes Point Like Arrows” gets buzzy: The drums stumble and clatter, and the sound design is pitched up. I like the way it writhes and contorts, as if breaking out of a shell to become royal. It led me back to a similar song, the trumpeter jaimie branch’s live version of “leaves of glass,” which unfolded similarly before locking into a headbanging groove. I guess I’m just a fool for songs that sound like living, breathing organisms, tracks you can almost feel stomping or sauntering through your speakers. The entirety of Ross’ album feels like this.

One more apology before moving forward: I also didn’t realize this is the same Brandon Ross from the band Harriet Tubman, the psychedelic rock outfit featuring Melvin Gibbs on bass and JT Lewis on drums. The sound is edgier, landing somewhere between funk and metal. And much like Ross’ Phantom Station outfit, the trio creates without preconceived notions of what it’s supposed to entail. “We’re trying to take it to the organic place where the music has a life of its own,” Lewis said of the band in 2018. “And it’s driven by our history and culture and by connecting dots all the way back to our ancestors.”

It’s been said that the band’s album of that year, The Terror End of Beauty, was partially indebted to the ashram gospel of Alice Coltrane and the breakneck guitar speed of Sonny Sharrock. “Our vocabulary comes from a place of experience of playing with great [improvisers] like Henry Threadgill and those masters who played in categories that were beyond words, as well: Ornette Coleman to Henry to Don Pullen and Ronald Shannon Jackson,” Lewis said in the same 2018 interview. “We developed our own language, and it just kept growing and becoming a life of its own.”

I hope Ross does the same thing with the Phantom Station project, because as much as I admire Off The End, I’d be curious to hear where else it goes, and for how long. Because I respect how Ross leans into the entirety of Black music, not just the pieces of it one would expect given his background in avant-garde jazz. If Off The End indicates his direction, as if anyone can predict where Ross is headed musically, the results will intrigue, even if the road to clarity is challenging.